Rosalind Franklin



from "Nobel Prize Women in Science".

Rosalind Franklin was a commanding leader who was fun-loving and very intelligent. She was an idealist about science, and in her time, the supreme experimentalist analyzing the molecules of heredity. Franklin liked hardcore facts. She did not like insubstantial speculation or high-flown theories. She liked indisputable and provable facts. She was a premier scientist who was not given credit for a lot of the contributions she made.

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born in London on July 25, 1920. She was the second of five children in a prominent and wealthy Jewish banking family. Starting at an early age, Rosalind felt discriminated against because she was a girl, even from her own family. Her parents found her "practical and unsentimental..literal-minded and not imaginative." Because of her excellent physics and chemistry classes at St. Paul's Girl School, Rosalind decided at the age of fifteen to become a scientist. However, her father strongly disapproved of women attending universities. He thought women should do volunteer work, they should not be professionals. He refused to pay her tuition. Rosalind's father, under heavy pressure from Rosalind's mother and aunt, finally agreed to pay the tuition for Rosalind to attend Cambridge University. Rosalind excelled in school and laboratory work.

After college, Franklin took a job that established her as a premier research scientist. This job entailed the study of physical structure of coals and carbon for the British Coal Utilization Research Association. She discovered the structural changes that happen when coals and carbons are heated and showed why some heated carbons turn into graphite. Her research helped found the science of high strength carbon fibers. The work earned her a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in physical chemistry in 1945. She was recognized as an authority in industrial chemistry.

Franklin realized that she needed to master the developing field of X-ray crystallography in order to understand what the universe is made of. Crystallography is a powerful technique used to reveal the position of atoms within matter. Franklin pioneered the use of X-ray diffraction to study disordered matter like carbons and complicated matter like biological molecules.

from "Nobel Prize Women in Science".

Through her innovations in crystallography, Franklin nearly discovered, on her own, enough information about the structure of DNA to explain the molecular basis of heredity. DNA, a molecule that is in all living cells, is the coded blueprint for transmitting inherited characteristics from generation to generation. The facts that she did uncover about DNA helped James Watson and Francis Crick beat her to the Nobel Prize. Watson was very harsh on "Rosy", saying that she was not a significant contributor to their discovery, when in fact, she made a rather large contribution. There is even speculation that Watson stole X-rays from Franklin that enabled him to show the helical structure of DNA that won him the Nobel Prize. They did not give Franklin sufficient credit to their accomplishment. As the facts about Franklin's life and scientific prowess have emerged, they have cast a shadow on Watson's and Crick's achievement and reestablished Franklin's place in the sun.

On April 16, 1958, Franklin died of ovarian cancer. She was just thirty-seven years old. Her work on two other major biological problems and the techniques for solving them helped lay the foundations of structural molecular biology.

Four years later, Crick, Watson, and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for medicine. Their three Nobel lectures cite ninety-eight references, none of them Franklin's. Most scientists today believe that if Franklin would have won the award, had she still been alive, or at least she deserved to.

Franklin was a remarkably smart, fun, and energetic woman. She lived for science. She did not have a family because she did not want to bring a child into the world when she knew she could not give the child the love and attention it needed. She was in love with being a scientist. She is a rare anomaly; a woman in the field of science. Her contributions will live on in science forever.