Rosalind Franklin was born in London on July 25th, 1920 in an Anglo-Jewish family. She was the second of five children of Ellis Arthur Franklin and Muriel Frances Waley and their eldest daughter. Her father was a partner in a London Bank. Rosalind did her schooling at St. Paul’s School for Girls and in 1938 she left St. Paul’s to enter Newnham College at Cambridge University. She majored in Physical Chemistry in 1941, obtaining her BA degree. She obtained a scholarship for a year from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.
Franklin’s Work on Coals and Carbon
In 1942, Franklin joined the newly-formed British Coal Utilization Research Association to pursue a Ph.D.-oriented research job which would also fulfill wartime needs. In four years, she elucidated the micro structures of various coals and carbon understanding the permeabilities of different types of coals. For her work (The Physical Chemistry of Solid Organic Colloids with special reference to Coals and Related Materials), she was awarded the Ph.D. degree from Cambridge in 1945.
Franklin’s Foray into Molecular Biology
Franklin joined Jacques Mering's lab at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimique de l'Etat in Paris, where she learnt X-ray crystallography and became a master of the technique. Here she earned an international repute for her work on structures of graphitizing and non-graphitizing carbons. In 1950, she took work in John Randall’s laboratory at King’s College in London, where she was asked to work on X-ray crystallographic studies of DNA.
The assistant lab chief, Maurice Wilkins had been working on the X-ray crystallographic studies on DNA and his impression was that he would be working with Franklin. But Randall did not deem it necessary for Franklin to join Wilkins; instead he deputed Raymond Gosling, a graduate student, to work under Franklin. With Gosling, Franklin found that DNA occurred in two forms (designated A and B forms). These forms were also called wet and dry forms; at high humidity (wet), DNA was long and thin and under dry conditions, it was short and fat.
The Controversy
Franklin was able to purify her samples to a high degree and her excellent pictures convinced her that DNA had a helical structure with the phosphate-sugar backbone on the outside of the helix. At the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, Francis Crick and James Watson were working on a theoretical model of DNA. They knew nothing of Franklin’s work but were shown Franklin’s famous photograph 51 by Maurice Wilkins. This critical data was all that Crick and Watson needed and they announced their discovery of the DNA structure in a paper in Nature on 25th April 1953.
Franklin’s personality has been described by many people; by James Watson (The Double Helix) as a “bad-tempered and arrogant woman who guarded her data from colleagues even though she did not know how to interpret it” and a “wronged heroine,” by her friend and biographer Anne Sayre. But what is now well known and later accepted by both Crick and Watson is that the data of Rosalind Franklin was the key element in their final elucidation of the double helical structure of the DNA molecule.
After King’s College
By that time, Franklin had shifted to Birkbeck College, where she worked on elucidating the structure of a whole virus (Tobacco Mosaic Virus; TMV). In 1956, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and after a two-year battle with the disease she succumbed on 16th April 1958. Rosalind Franklin’s brilliant scientific career was cut short at the age of 37. During her 16 year career, she had published 19 papers on coals and carbons, 5 on DNA and 21 on viruses. Since Nobel Prizes are not given posthumously, she missed out on a rightful recognition, when in 1962 Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared the Nobel. Nevertheless, Rosalind Franklin’s contribution has been duly acknowledged and appreciated.
References:
Access Excellence Resource Center Website. “Rosalind Franklin (1920 – 1958)." Accessexcellence.org (Accessed 17th June 2010)
PBS Website “A Science Odyssey – People and Discoveries – Rosalind Franklin.” Pbs.org (Accessed 17th June 2010)
Profiles in Science – National Library of Medicine. “The Rosalind Franklin Papers.” Profiles.nlm.nih.gov (Accessed 17th June 2010)
“Rosalind Franklin – 1920-58” Zephyrus.co.uk (Accessed 17th June 2010)
San Diego Super Computer Center Website. “Rosalind Elsie Franklin.” Scsd.edu (Accessed 17th June 2010)
Jitendra Rathod - Jitendra holds a Master's Degree in Microbiology. He had been a Lecturer, teaching the subject to undergrads and postgrads for 8 years.
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