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Rosalind Franklin — Women’s History Month Profile in Science
She never won a Nobel prize, but her work did. Proof of the now famous double-helix of deoxyribonucleic acid — the shape of DNA — was her breakthrough. Though she was trained as a physicist and chemist, Rosalind Franklin’s work led to one of the greatest discoveries in the history of genetics and she’s considered to be a pioneer of molecular biology.
James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize for uncovering the structure of DNA in 1962, 10 years after Rosalind’s discovery and decades before we all learned the truth.
Rosalind Franklin was born in 1920 in London, England. She obtained a PhD in Physical Chemistry from Cambridge University, working on the structure of carbon and coal efficiency. After moving to Paris after World War II and learning more techniques for performing X-ray crystallography, she joined Maurice Wilkins’ lab at Kings College in London in 1950. It was there that she fine-tuned an X-ray machine to be capable of crystallographic imaging.
This work deserves a Nobel of its own.
X-ray crystallography was a new technique that Rosalind pioneered for the study of large, complex biological molecules. It is extensively used today to understand proteins and protein-gene interactions and has led to at least 25 Nobel…
