�ʹڲ�Ʊ

Dr. Rosalind Franklin was born on the 25th of July 1920 in London, England. She grew up in a wealthy Jewish family who taught her the importance of education, at a time when a woman pursuing higher education was rare ¹. By the age of 16 she knew she wanted to study science. In 1941 she completed a bachelor’s degree in physical chemistry at the University of Cambridge.��

Although Franklin was awarded a prestigious research fellowship upon graduating, she instead decided to contribute to the war effort during World War II. This led her to research the properties of coal and carbon with the British Coal Utilisation Research Association ^1,2.����

In 1945, Franklin completed her PhD at Cambridge, and prompted by her love for travel, began a postdoctoral research fellowship with Jacques Méring in Paris ^1,2. It was here that she became highly trained in X-ray diffraction; a technique that would later prove crucial to solving the hotly debated structure of DNA.��

In 1951, Franklin returned to London to work with Sir. John Randall at King’s College London ^1,3. Here, her research on DNA’s structure was undertaken with graduate student Ray Gosling, alongside Maurice Wilkins. Although Franklin and Wilkins collaborated, it was well known that they often did not see eye-to-eye ⁴.��

The laboratory at King’s College London often discussed their research with James Watson and Francis Crick at the University of Cambridge. However, Franklin was often excluded from these discussions ⁵. This was to her disadvantage, as Wilkins later showed Watson an X-ray diffraction image of DNA, known as Photograph 51, that had been taken by Franklin and Gosling 8 months prior ⁴. This photograph was crucial, as it suggested that DNA was arranged in a helical shape. Watson and Crick also received an unpublished report from the King’s College laboratory containing a page of Franklin’s data ⁶. Again, this report that contained detailed information about the structure of DNA, was shared without Franklin’s knowledge.��

Despite seeing the image and report, Watson and Crick’s discovery was said to have come about organically via the “trial and error of cardboard cut-out models” in 1953 ⁷.�� In an attempt to correct this, they later admitted that, without Franklin’s data, “the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible” ⁸.�� While she was noted as an equal contributor upon early publication, reporting has often overlooked this ⁴.

By the time the structure of DNA was published, Franklin had left Randall’s lab and was working at Birkbeck College. Here she applied her impressive crystallography abilities to understand the structure of several devastating viruses such as poliovirus and the tobacco mosaic virus. She received a large grant from the USA to further her work, but this important research was halted at its peak because she passed away following an ovarian cancer diagnosis in 1958 ⁹.

In 1962, Watson, Crick and Wilkins were awarded the joint Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Franklin was unfortunately ineligible to receive the award as it is not given posthumously ¹⁰. If Rosalind Franklin had lived, would she have received the Nobel Prize? Although we will never know, it is clear that Watson and Crick may not have solved the structure of DNA without her vital contributions.