Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born on 25 July 1920 at 50 Chepstow Villas in Notting Hill, London, into a prosperous and politically engaged British Jewish family. Her father, Ellis Arthur Franklin, was a merchant banker who also taught evening classes at the Working Men's College, and the family was deeply involved in civic life. From childhood, Franklin displayed a striking aptitude for arithmetic and the sciences, and her aunt described her at age six as 'alarmingly clever'. She also excelled at Latin and sports, and became fluent in French, a language that would prove professionally useful.

At eleven, Franklin was enrolled at St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, one of very few girls' schools in London that taught physics and chemistry. She passed her school matriculation in 1938 with six distinctions and won a scholarship to university. Her father initially asked her to give that scholarship to a refugee student, reflecting the family's active efforts to shelter Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe. Franklin went on to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied chemistry within the Natural Sciences Tripos, graduating in 1941 with second-class honours.

After Cambridge, Franklin worked briefly under physical chemist Ronald Norrish, an experience she found deeply frustrating. She left to join the British Coal Utilisation Research Association in 1942, where she studied the fine pore structures of coal using helium to measure density. By establishing the relationship between molecular size and what substances were expelled from coal at increasing temperatures, she provided a practical method for classifying coals and predicting their suitability for fuel and wartime applications such as gas masks. This research formed the basis of her PhD, awarded by Cambridge in 1945.

With the war over, Franklin moved to Paris in 1947 to work as a researcher at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat under Jacques Mering, an expert in applying X-ray diffraction to amorphous substances such as rayon. Mering taught her the practical techniques of X-ray crystallography, and Franklin applied them to carbonaceous materials, studying how their atomic arrangements changed when converted to graphite. She coined the terms 'graphitising' and 'non-graphitising' carbon, work that entered mainstream chemistry textbooks. Her years in Paris were among the happiest of her life; she loved France, its people, and its language.

In January 1951, Franklin joined King's College London as a research associate, redirected by laboratory director John Randall to study DNA fibres using X-ray diffraction. A critical innovation she introduced was a humidity-controlled camera chamber, which allowed her to observe that DNA existed in two distinct physical forms: a longer, thinner form at higher humidity, which she eventually named B, and a shorter, fatter form she named A. She quickly determined that the phosphate groups of the DNA molecule sat on the outside of the structure, a finding with major implications for any model of its shape.

Franklin and her assigned student Raymond Gosling produced X-ray images of exceptional quality. Gosling's photograph of the B form, later known as Photo 51, captured the clearest diffraction evidence yet seen for a helical structure in DNA. In January 1953, Franklin's colleague Maurice Wilkins showed this photograph to James Watson without Franklin's knowledge or permission. Separately, a Medical Research Council report containing Franklin's crystallographic calculations was passed to Francis Crick by his supervisor Max Perutz. These data, including confirmation of a 34-Angstrom repeat distance and the molecule's symmetry, proved decisive when Watson and Crick completed their double-helix model in March 1953.

By the time Watson and Crick announced their model, Franklin had independently worked through much of the same problem. Her own draft manuscript, dated 17 March 1953 and discovered among her papers years later by her colleague Aaron Klug, showed she had concluded that B-DNA was helical with two chains and that the phosphate groups were on the outside. Her two papers on A-DNA had already been sent to the journal Acta Crystallographica on 6 March, the day before the Cambridge team finished their model. A paper by Franklin and Gosling appeared in the same 25 April 1953 issue of Nature as the Watson-Crick paper, though it was positioned as supporting evidence rather than as a co-equal contribution.

Franklin moved to Birkbeck College in mid-March 1953, where she was recruited by crystallographer John Desmond Bernal. Under his umbrella, she built her own research group and turned her X-ray expertise toward the molecular structures of viruses, particularly the tobacco mosaic virus, an RNA virus. In 1955 she published findings in Nature showing that all tobacco mosaic virus particles were the same length, directly contradicting the view of prominent virologist Norman Pirie. Her observation proved correct. She also discovered that the virus's protein subunits were arranged in helices, and her team published a series of landmark papers on plant viruses through the late 1950s.

Franklin also initiated research into the polio virus after 1956, securing what was at the time the largest research grant ever received at Birkbeck. She had been invited to build a five-foot model of the tobacco mosaic virus for Expo 58, the international world's fair in Brussels, and completed it in 1957 using materials including table tennis balls and plastic bicycle handlebar grips. The Brussels fair opened on 17 April 1958, the day after Franklin died. In mid-1956 she had first noticed symptoms of illness; surgery in September of that year revealed two abdominal tumours. She continued working through periods of hospitalisation and treatment, producing thirteen papers in 1956 and 1957 alone, before dying on 16 April 1958 in London of ovarian cancer, at age 37.

In 1962, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins for the discovery of the structure of DNA. Franklin had died four years earlier, and Nobel rules at the time barred posthumous awards. Watson later stated that, had she lived, Franklin ideally would have been awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Aaron Klug, who inherited leadership of Franklin's research group and continued her virus work, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982 for research that directly built on what Franklin had begun. Klug published assessments of Franklin's actual contribution to the DNA story in 1968 and 1974, partly in response to Watson's memoir The Double Helix, which had depicted her unfavourably.

The question of how Franklin's data reached the Cambridge team without her knowledge became a lasting controversy. Wilkins showed Gosling's Photo 51 to Watson, and Perutz passed on the MRC report containing Franklin's calculations, neither action taken with her consent or knowledge. Watson and Crick's published paper acknowledged only a vague debt to the 'unpublished experimental results' of the King's College group, citing no specific data. Maddox, in a widely praised biography, argued that this acknowledgement was far too thin given how directly Franklin's measurements had shaped the final model. Evidence published in 2023, including a draft article prepared in consultation with Franklin herself, suggested that by the time the model was announced, she understood herself to have been engaged in a collaborative, if complicated, joint effort with the Cambridge team rather than a competition.