Franklin, Rosalind (1920 - 1958) Essay -- Papers

Franklin, Rosalind (1920 - 1958) Franklin was a Londoner by birth. After graduating from Cambridge University, she joined the staff of the British Coal Utilisation Research Association in 1942, moving in 1947 to the Laboratoire Centrale des Services Chimique de L'Etat in Paris. She returned to England in 1950 and held research appointments at London University, initially at King's College from 1951 to 1953 and thereafter at Birkbeck College until her untimely death from cancer at the age of 37. Franklin played a major part in the discovery of the structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick. With the unflattering and distorted picture presented by Watson in his The Double Helix (1968) her role in this has become somewhat controversial. At King's, she had been recruited to work on biological molecules and her director, John Randall, had specifically instructed her to work on the structure of DNA. When she later learned that Maurice Wilkins, a colleague at King's, also intended to work on DNA, she felt unable to cooperate with him. Nor did she feel much respect for the early attempts of Watson and Crick in Cambridge to establish the structure. The causes of friction were various ranging from simple personality clashes to, it has been said, male hostility to the invasion of their private club by a woman. Despite this unsatisfactory background Franklin did obtain results without which the structure established by Watson and Crick would have been at the least delayed. The most important of these was her x-ray photograph of hydrated DNA, the so-called B form, the most revealing such photograph then available. Watson fir... ...anklin's showing an image of the now famous Photo 51. Franklin, went on to study the tobacco mosaic virus, and continued her work in absolute dedication, despite having been diagnosed with cancer in 1956 (probably due to the chemicals she was using). She died two years later, 37 years old, never knowing how much her work had played a role in Watson and Crick's discovery. In 1963 they received the Nobel prize for their discovery, along with Wilkins, Franklin's collaborator. In 1968 Watson's popular book, The Double Helix, recounted the events leading to their ultimate discovery, making clear for the first time how critical Franklin's experimental work had been. Franklin's social isolation prompted by the contempt male scientists showed toward her as a woman-scientist, is one of the tragedies in the history of science.