90 Facts About Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite.

Rosalind Franklin graduated in 1941 with a degree in natural sciences from Newnham College, Cambridge, and then enrolled for a PhD in physical chemistry under Ronald George Wreyford Norrish, the 1920 Chair of Physical Chemistry at the University of Cambridge.

The research on coal helped Rosalind Franklin earn a PhD from Cambridge in 1945.

Rosalind Franklin is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA while at King's College London, particularly Photo 51, taken by her student Raymond Gosling, which led to the discovery of the DNA double helix for which Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962.

Watson suggested that Rosalind Franklin would have ideally been awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Wilkins but, although there was not yet a rule against posthumous awards, the Nobel Committee generally did not make posthumous nominations.

Rosalind Franklin was born in 50 Chepstow Villas, Notting Hill, London, into an affluent and influential British Jewish family.

Rosalind Franklin's father, Ellis Arthur Rosalind Franklin, was a politically liberal London merchant banker who taught at the city's Working Men's College, and her mother was Muriel Frances Waley.

Rosalind Franklin was the elder daughter and the second child in the family of five children.

Rosalind Franklin's family was actively involved with the Working Men's College, where her father taught the subjects of electricity, magnetism, and the history of the Great War in the evenings, later becoming the vice principal.

Rosalind Franklin's parents helped settle Jewish refugees from Europe who had escaped the Nazis, particularly those from the Kindertransport.

At age nine, Rosalind Franklin entered a boarding school, Lindores School for Young Ladies in Sussex.

Rosalind Franklin was 11 when she went to St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, west London, one of the few girls' schools in London that taught physics and chemistry.

Rosalind Franklin learned German, and became fluent in French, a language she would later find useful.

Rosalind Franklin's father asked her to give the scholarship to a deserving refugee student.

Rosalind Franklin went to Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1938 and studied chemistry within the Natural Sciences Tripos.

In 1941, Rosalind Franklin was awarded second-class honours from her final exams.

Rosalind Franklin was awarded a research fellowship at Newnham College, with which she joined the physical chemistry laboratory of the University of Cambridge to work under Ronald George Wreyford Norrish, who later won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Rosalind Franklin studied the porosity of coal using helium to determine its density.

Rosalind Franklin joined the labo of Mering on 14 February 1947 as one of the fifteen chercheurs.

Rosalind Franklin taught her the practical aspects of applying X-ray crystallography to amorphous substances.

Rosalind Franklin applied them to further problems related to coal and to other carbonaceous materials, in particular the changes to the arrangement of atoms when these are converted to graphite.

Rosalind Franklin published several further papers on this work which has become part of the mainstream of the physics and chemistry of coal and carbon.

Rosalind Franklin was originally appointed to work on X-ray diffraction of proteins and lipids in solution, but Randall redirected Franklin's work to DNA fibres because of new developments in the field, and she was to be the only experienced experimental diffraction researcher at King's at the time.

Randall made this reassignment, even before Rosalind Franklin started working at King's, because of the pioneering work by DNA researcher Maurice Wilkins, and he reassigned Raymond Gosling, the graduate student who had been working with Wilkins, to be her assistant.

Rosalind Franklin freely distributed the DNA sample, later referred to as the Signer DNA, in early May 1950 at the meeting of the Faraday Society in London, and Wilkins was one of the recipients.

Rosalind Franklin, now working with Gosling, started to apply her expertise in X-ray diffraction techniques to the structure of DNA.

Rosalind Franklin used a new fine-focus X-ray tube and microcamera ordered by Wilkins, but which she refined, adjusted and focused carefully.

Rosalind Franklin presented their data at a lecture in November 1951, in King's College London.

Rosalind Franklin chose the data rich "A" form while Wilkins selected the "B" form.

Rosalind Franklin must have mailed them while the Cambridge team was building their model, and certainly had written them before she knew of their work.

On 8 July 1953, Rosalind Franklin modified one of these "in proof" Acta articles, "in light of recent work" by the King's and Cambridge research teams.

Rosalind Franklin then published in 1974 an evaluation of the draft's close correlation with the third of the original trio of 25 April 1953 Nature DNA articles.

Klug had written this first article in response to the incomplete picture of Rosalind Franklin's work depicted in James Watson's 1968 memoir, The Double Helix.

The unimpressed Rosalind Franklin became angry when Watson suggested she did not know how to interpret her own data.

Model building had been applied successfully in the elucidation of the structure of the alpha helix by Linus Pauling in 1951, but Rosalind Franklin was opposed to prematurely building theoretical models, until sufficient data were obtained to properly guide the model building.

Rosalind Franklin took the view that building a model was to be undertaken only after enough of the structure was known.

Rosalind Franklin's conviction was only reinforced when Pauling and Corey came up in the late 1952 with an erroneous triple helix model.

Since Rosalind Franklin had decided to transfer to Birkbeck College and Randall had insisted that all DNA work must stay at King's, Wilkins was given copies of Rosalind Franklin's diffraction photographs by Gosling.

Watson and Crick finished building their model on 7 March 1953, a day before they received a letter from Wilkins stating that Rosalind Franklin was finally leaving and they could put "all hands to the pump".

One of the most critical and overlooked moments in DNA research was how and when Rosalind Franklin realised and conceded that B-DNA was a double helical molecule.

Rosalind Franklin was recruited by physics department chair John Desmond Bernal, a crystallographer who was a communist, known for promoting female crystallographers.

John Finch, a physics student from King's College London, subsequently joined Rosalind Franklin's group, followed by Kenneth Holmes, a Cambridge graduate, in July 1955.

Rosalind Franklin continued to explore another major nucleic acid, RNA, a molecule equally central to life as DNA.

Rosalind Franklin again used X-ray crystallography to study the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus, an RNA virus.

Rosalind Franklin's meeting with Aaron Klug in early 1954 led to a longstanding and successful collaboration.

In 1955, Rosalind Franklin published her first major works on TMV in Nature, where she described that all TMV virus particles were of the same length.

Rosalind Franklin assigned the study of the complete structure of TMV to her PhD student Holmes.

Rosalind Franklin had a research assistant, James Watt, subsidised by the National Coal Board and was now the leader of the ARC group at Birkbeck.

Rosalind Franklin worked on the precise location of RNA molecules in TMV.

In 1956, Caspar and Rosalind Franklin published individual but complementary papers in the 10 March issue of Nature, in which they showed that the RNA in TMV is wound along the inner surface of the hollow virus.

Caspar was not an enthusiastic writer, and Rosalind Franklin had to write the entire manuscript for him.

Rosalind Franklin was invited to make a five-foot high model of TMV, which she started in 1957.

Rosalind Franklin's materials included table tennis balls and plastic bicycle handlebar grips.

In 1956, Rosalind Franklin visited the University of California, Berkeley, where colleagues suggested her group research the polio virus.

Rosalind Franklin obtained Bernal's consent in July 1957, though serious concerns were raised after Franklin disclosed her intentions to research live, instead of killed, polio virus at Birkbeck.

Rosalind Franklin attempted to mount the virus crystals in capillary tubes for X-ray studies, but was forced to end her work due to her rapidly failing health.

Rosalind Franklin joined the Jewish Society while in her first term at Cambridge, out of respect of her grandfather's request.

Rosalind Franklin confided to her sister that she was "always consciously a Jew".

Rosalind Franklin considered the French lifestyle at that time as "vastly superior to that of English".

In contrast, Rosalind Franklin described English people as having "vacant stupid faces and childlike complacency".

Rosalind Franklin's family was almost stuck in Norway in 1939, as World War II was declared on their way home.

Rosalind Franklin collaborated with Slovenian chemist Dusan Hadzi whom she met at King's College in 1951.

Rosalind Franklin held lectures in Zagreb and Belgrade and visited Dalmatia.

Rosalind Franklin made several professional trips to the United States, and was particularly jovial among her American friends and constantly displayed her sense of humour.

William Ginoza of the University of California, Los Angeles, later recalled that Rosalind Franklin was the opposite of Watson's description of her, and as Maddox comments, Americans enjoyed her "sunny side".

Rosalind Franklin praises her intellect and scientific acumen, but portrays Franklin as difficult to work with and careless with her appearance.

Rosalind Franklin did not want to be called by that name because she had a great-aunt Rosy.

Rosalind Franklin initially blamed Winston Churchill for inciting the war, but later admired him for his speeches.

Rosalind Franklin actively supported Professor John Ryle as an independent candidate for parliament in the 1940 Cambridge University by-election, but he was unsuccessful.

Rosalind Franklin did not seem to have an intimate relationship with anyone, and always kept her deepest personal feelings to herself.

Rosalind Franklin once told Evi, that a man who had a flat on the same floor as hers, asked if she would like to come in for a drink, but she did not understand the intention.

Rosalind Franklin was quite infatuated by her French mentor Mering, who had a wife and a mistress.

In mid-1956, while on a work-related trip to the United States, Rosalind Franklin first began to suspect a health problem.

Rosalind Franklin chose not to stay with her parents because her mother's uncontrollable grief and crying upset her too much.

Rosalind Franklin returned to work in January 1958, and was given a promotion to Research Associate in Biophysics on 25 February.

Rosalind Franklin fell ill again on 30 March, and died a few weeks later on 16 April 1958, in Chelsea, London, of bronchopneumonia, secondary carcinomatosis, and ovarian cancer.

Rosalind Franklin was interred on 17 April 1958 in the family plot at Willesden United Synagogue Cemetery at Beaconsfield Road in London Borough of Brent.

The Public Broadcasting Service biography of Rosalind Franklin goes further, stating that he refused to pay her fees, and that an aunt stepped in to do that for her.

Maddox says, Rosalind Franklin laughed at men who were embarrassed by the appointment of the first female professor, Dorothy Garrod.

Rosalind Franklin specified the amount of water to be found in the molecule in accordance with other parts of it, data that have considerable importance for the stability of the molecule.

Rosalind Franklin was the first to discover and articulate these facts, which constituted the basis for all later attempts to build a model of the molecule.

Sayre's biography of Rosalind Franklin contains a story alleging that the photograph 51 in question was shown to Watson by Wilkins without Rosalind Franklin's permission, and that this constituted a case of bad science ethics.

Rosalind Franklin later expressed regret that greater discussion of co-authorship had not taken place as this might have helped to clarify the contribution the work at King's had made to the discovery.

Fifteen years after the fact, the first clear recitation of Rosalind Franklin's contribution appeared as it permeated Watson's account, The Double Helix, although it was buried under descriptions of Watson's regard towards Rosalind Franklin during the period of their work on DNA.

Rosalind Franklin's work was a crucial part in the discovery of DNA's structure, which along with subsequent related work led to Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins being awarded a Nobel Prize in 1962.

Rosalind Franklin had died in 1958, and during her lifetime, the DNA structure was not considered to be fully proven.

Watson has suggested that ideally Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin would have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

False Assumptions by Lawrence Aronovitch is a play about the life of Marie Curie in which Rosalind Franklin is portrayed as frustrated and angry at the lack of recognition for her scientific contributions.

Rosalind Franklin is fictionalised in Marie Benedict's novel Her Hidden Genius, released in January 2022.

Rosalind Franklin was noted as "the chemist that actually discovered DNA" in episode three of the 2019 Netflix series Daybreak.