Rosalind Elsie Franklin

Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Elsie Franklin (25 July 1920 – 16 April 1958) is probably the most famous yet controversial female scientist in terms of the critical contributions to the understanding of molecular structure of DNA. Apart from her most known work, she also dedicate her life to the investigation of viruses, coal and graphite.

Franklin was educated at a private school in London where she studied physics and chemistry from an early age, at an advanced level, especially so for a woman at that time. An excellent and dedicated student, she earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1945 from Cambridge University. Early in her career, it was Rosalind Franklin who painstakingly conceived of and captured "Photograph 51" of the "B" form of DNA in 1952 while at King's College in London. It is this photograph, acquired through 100 hours of X-ray exposure from a machine Dr. Franklin herself refined, that revealed the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA.

The discovery of the structure of DNA was the most important advance of modern biology. Quite simply, it changed the future of healthcare forever. James Watson and Francis Crick, working at Cambridge University, used Photograph 51 as the basis for their famous model of DNA which culminated in their Nobel Prize in 1962. 

Photo 51

Franklin was responsible for much of the research and discovery work that led to the understanding of the structure of DNA. The story of DNA is a tale of competition and intrigue, told one way in James Watson's book The Double Helix, and quite another in Anne Sayre's study, Rosalind Franklin and DNA. James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins received a Nobel Prize for the double-helix model of DNA in 1962.
In the summer of 1956, while on a work-related trip to the United States, Franklin found she could no longer do up her skirt because of a lump around her abdomen. It was too much exposure to X-ray radiation when she was working with in order to get the photo of DNA caused the illness. She fell ill again and again afterwards, and she died on April 16, 1958, in Chelsea, London.