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Rosalind Franklin was born in London, England. Her family was prosperous and very
involved in social and public events. Her father wanted to be a scientist, but his
education was cut short by World War I and he became a teacher instead. Rosalind
Franklin went to St. Paul's Girls' School, which was one of the very few places
that taught physics and chemistry to girls at that time. She was extremely
intelligent and by the age of 15 she had decided that she wanted to be a scientist.
Her father actively discouraged her interest in science because it was very
difficult for women to have such a career. However, she came to
Cambridge University
in 1938 to study chemistry.
When she graduated from Cambridge, Rosalind Franklin was awarded a research
scholarship and she spent a year in R.G.W. Norrish's laboratory. This year was not a
great success. R.G.W. Norrish recognized Rosalind Franklin's potential, but he
was not very encouraging or supportive toward her. When she was offered the chance
to become a scientist at the British Coal Utilization Research Association (CURA),
Rosalind Franklin gave up her fellowship and took the job. CURA was a young
organization and there were not many rules or regulations on the way research
had to be done. Rosalind Franklin could work fairly independently at CURA,
which suited her very well. She worked for CURA until 1947, studying the physical
structure of coal.
After spending some years in Paris, France, learning how to use X-rays to study
materials, Rosalind Franklin returned to England. In 1951, she was offered a job
at King's College in London. Her new job
was to use the things she had learnt in
Paris to set up and improve the X-ray crystallography unit at King's College.
Maurice Wilkins was already using X-ray crystallography
at King's College, London,
to try to solve the structure of DNA. Rosalind Franklin arrived while Maurice
Wilkins was away. On his return, he assumed that she had been hired to be his
assistant. It was a bad start to a relationship that never got any better.
Working with a student, Raymond Gosling, Rosalind Franklin was able to get two
sets of good quality images of crystallized DNA fibers. From these images she
figured out the basic size and shape of DNA strands.
At the same time, James Watson and
Francis Crick were working at the Cavendish
Laboratory in Cambridge trying to discover the structure of DNA. James Watson
saw Rosalind Franklin present her findings at a meeting in King's College, London.
Unfortunately, he did not pay close attention and so was not able to fully describe
the lecture or the results to Francis Crick. Rosalind Franklin did not know James
Watson and Francis Crick as well as Maurice Wilkins did and never truly worked
with them. Some time later, Maurice Wilkins showed James Watson and Francis
Crick the X-ray images that Rosalind Franklin had made. The images confirmed the
3-D structure that James Watson and Francis Crick had suggested for DNA. In 1953,
both Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin announced the results of their X-ray
work at the same time as James Watson and Francis Crick announced their model of
the structure of DNA.
Rosalind Franklin left King's College, London, in 1953 and went to work in the
Birkbeck laboratory, studying viruses. She actually did a lot of the work on
viruses while suffering from cancer. She died from cancer in 1958. In 1962, the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick,
and Maurice Wilkins for solving the structure of DNA. Unfortunately, the Nobel
committee does not give posthumous prizes.
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