Rosalind Franklin was vital in the discovery of one of the most complex and important macromolecules in all living things: DNA. And yet, her work in the research and discovery of DNA has been hushed up and swept under the rug for decades. While she had been forgotten and her legacy extinguished, she was nevertheless one of the most prominent women scientists in history.
Rosalind Franklin (below)
Rosalind was born in London to a Jewish family in 1920. She studied physics and chemistry at Cambridge University. While studying at Cambridge, World War 2 inspired her to aid in the war effort, and led to her work about coal and its structure. This work began her use of X-ray diffraction technology, which later became pivotal in her career. After graduating from Cambridge in 1941 she pursued a fellowship in chemistry, and continued to study structure with X-ray crystallography. She later moved to Paris in 1946 to work with Jacques Méring in studying x-ray crystallography. Finally in 1951 she accepted a position at King’s College where she began her famous work on DNA.
Franklin made more than one contribution to biology during her time at King’s College, although her discovery of the structure of DNA is by far, her most well known research. Her other contributions included discoveries on the structure of virus coatings, a discovery that the tobacco mosaic virus genetic material is not housed on the inside, but rather in its proteins, and was not DNA, but single-stranded RNA. She also discovered the density of DNA, which helped future work in discovering its composition.
Photograph 51, by Franklin
Her discovery of DNA’s structure arose when she managed to sharpen X-ray crystallography images. Her work with X-ray distillation made her an expert in the field, and she managed to capture the image seen to the right, which shows two crossing lines of black dots. What these two lines are in actuality are strands of DNA, crossing and winding around each other, in a double helix, with bonds in between them, maintaining the DNAs structure. This can be seen more clearly in the image to the left.
While she was overall thought to be a kindhearted and passionate person, some viewed her as short-tempered and disagreeable. One particularly who thought her to be unpleasant was Maurice Wilkins, a colleague of hers from King’s College. Wilkins and Franklin were meant to be partners in their work on DNA, but their disagreements lead them to work in isolation, and after hearing his friend Francis Crick was working to find the structure of DNA with his own partner, James Watson, he shared Photograph 51 with them, which proved critical in their discovery, and later publication, of DNAs double helical shape. Since her early death at the age of 37, Franklin’s contribution has been neglected, but in recent years her work has been given the credit it is owed and her legacy has been restored.
Bibliography
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Rosalind Franklin". Encyclopedia Britannica, 6 Jan. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rosalind-Franklin. Accessed 22 March 2021.
Miko, Ilona, and Lorrie LeJeune. Nature News, Nature Publishing Group, 17 Jan. 2014, www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/rosalind-franklin-a-crucial-contribution-6538012/.
“Rosalind Franklin at 100: Structures and Symmetries.” Rosalind Franklin at 100: Structures and Symmetries | King's Cultural Community | King's College London, www.kcl.ac.uk/cultural/-/projects/rosalind-franklin.
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