Rosalind Franklin (1920 – 1958)

 

Franklin was born in a Jewish family in London and attended a girl’s school when she was young. She then went to Newnham Collage in Cambridge to study physics and chemistry. In 1942, she began to research at the British Coal Utilization Research Association helping with the carbon fibre technology. In 1947, Franklin worked on X-ray diffraction in Paris for the Central Government Laboratory. In 1951, she moved back to London and worked for King’s college. She started working on what she thought was her own DNA project, but when Maurice Wilkins, laboratory’s second-in-command, came back from a vacation, Franklin became Wilkins’ assistant rather than a colleague. They had an uneasy and complicated relationship. There were also many rumours regarding Franklin’s work, because of her gender. She then made an important discovery of the DNA with x-ray; she was the first ever to take a photo of DNA. Together with Wilkins, they published their x-ray diffraction pictures of DNA in Nature in April 1953, with Franklin’s name as first author. However, because of the amount of time she spend working with x-ray she was exposed to a lot of radiations and was later diagnosed with ovarian cancer and died in 1958 at the age of 37. Unfortunately for Franklin, there’s a rule against rewarding a dead person with the Nobel Prize, therefore Wilkins was rewarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. 

     "Rosalind Franklin." Jewish Virtual Library - Homepage. Web. 08 Feb. 2012. <http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/franklin.html>.