Biographies

Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920 - 1958)

Rosalind Franklin took her Part II in Natural sciences at Newnham in 1941. Her thesis research, explaining why some coal-like structures form graphite at high temperatures, while others never do, was her first great triumph. Following a stint in Paris, she took up a fellowship at Kings College London, where J.T. Randall had given her the job of elucidating the structure of DNA, using the X-ray diffraction techniques she had learned in France.

A brilliant experimentalist, she succeeded in taking the famous "photo 51", of DNA in its so-called B-form, which J.D. Bernal described in Rosalind's obituary as "among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken”. Her colleague Wilkins showed the photo (without Rosalind’s knowledge) to James Watson from Cambridge: this enabled Watson and his colleague Crick to take the speculative leap to the famous double helix structure of DNA, thus beating the Kings group to the solution. Shortly afterwards, Rosalind took her fellowship to Bernal’s group at Birkbeck, where she built up her own research group and applied her techniques to the problem of RNA virus structures, with several notable successes.

Rosalind Franklin, once described by Maurice Wilkins as "our dark lady", cannot have been an easy person to work with. Combative when she knew she was right, she was direct, intellectually brilliant and demanding of her colleagues. Most of them saw only one side of her. Away from her lab she was a keen climber, an excellent cook, a much-loved daughter, sister, aunt and friend, whose care and thoughtfulness touched all on whom she bestowed her attentions. At 37, and already a scientific star, she died of ovarian cancer.

Rachael Padman, 2004

To read further

• Brenda Maddox, "Rosalind Franklin: the dark lady of DNA", Harper Collins, London 2002
• Anne Sayre, "Rosalind Franklin and DNA", Norton, NY, 1975
• Jenifer Glynn (sister), "Rosalind Franklin, 1920 - 1958", in Edward Shils & Carmen Blacker, eds "Cambridge Women: Twelve Portraits"
• Aaron Klug, The Discovery of the Double Helix, in DNA: Changing Science and Society, ed. Torsten Krude, Cambridge University Press, 2003.