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Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920 - 1958) was a British physical chemist and crystallographer who made important contributions to the understanding of the structures of coal, viruses and DNA. Her experiments played an important role in the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. In 1950 she won a fellowship to work at King's College in London, where she worked on the x-ray analysis of the structure of the molecule DNA, whose role as the genetic messenger carrying information on cell replication had only recently been discovered. She took exceptionally sharp and clear pictures that revealed for the first time that there were two forms of DNA and used this to help determine the sizes of the components of DNA. She was never aware that Crick and Watson had access to her photographs and data and would use that this would result in their receiving most of the credit for what was undoubtedly one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. Her contribution is not as widely known as that of Crick and Watson because she died four years before the Nobel prize was awarded for their work in 1962, and Nobel prizes are never awarded posthumously. It has been speculated that her contracting cancer of the ovary and resulting death at the young age of 37 was a result of the frequent exposure to X-ray radiation from her laboratory work.
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Created October 23, 2006. |