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Rosalind Franklin - Photographer of DNA

© Jackie DiGiovanni

Rosalind Franklin - Photographer of DNA

Rosalind Franklin was born July 25, 1920 in London to prosperous parents, Ellis and Muriel Waley Franklin. Mr. Franklin was a prominent banker and the family was active in community activities. Franklin attended St. Paul's Girls' School where she was an excellent student and especially enjoyed science. When she expressed her desire to become a scientist, her father strenuously disapproved. He wasn't in favor of higher education for women, and thought women should marry and do charitable work. Other family members brought pressure to the situation by offering to pay the tuition costs, and her father finally relented. Franklin attended Newnham College in Cambridge.

Franklin graduated from Newnham with a B.A. in 1941 and from Cambridge University with a Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1945 . Her graduate work was interrupted when, during World War II, she joined the staff at the British Coal Utilization Research Association, as part of the war effort, working on the problem of making coal more efficient. She published five papers during this time. Her research became the basis of her doctoral thesis.

In 1947, Franklin accepted a position as Cherucheur at the the Laboratoire Centrale des Services Chimiques de l'Etat in Paris, working with Jacques Mering. This was a pleasant time for her, and she enjoyed many friends. She learned about X-ray diffraction, a relatively new and promising technology. She was considered a master at creating and analyzing the photographs of biological entities.

In 1951, Franklin began a three-year fellowship at King's College working under John Randall with the understanding that she would conduct research on DNA using the crystallographic imaging processes she had learned in France. Communications were missing or misguided and another researcher, Maurice Wilkins, assumed Franklin was his subordinate. The bad will from their initial encounters continued. Franklin's time at King's College was further demeaned as women were not allowed in university dining rooms, and many of her colleagues went to male-only pubs for after-work socializing.

Franklin was assigned to work on deciphering the structure of DNA, using X-ray crystallography, which provided a pictorial mapping of atoms. Franklin was a perfectionist, and her extraordinarily detailed work produced excellent images. Unknown to her, and without her permission, Wilkins gave a copy of her unpublished work to two researchers at Cambridge University, Watson and Crick. They added Franklin's findings to their own efforts and correctly described the double helix nature of DNA. There is a serious question of ethics surrounding Wilkins' sharing and Watson's non-acknowledgement of Franklin's contribution. An article co-authored by Franklin and Raymond Gosling describing their research, which showed two forms of DNA and one having a helical