Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin was born on July 25th, 1920 in London, England. She attended St. Paul’s Girls’ School before attending Cambridge University for chemistry. Her excellence in science allowed her to conduct research at the university, however the second World War put her work on pause.
During the war she pivoted to studying carbon and coal to assist in the war effort. This research earned Franklin a doctorate from Cambridge in 1945.
Franklin then moved on to work at the State Chemical Laboratory in Paris to study x-rays. Through this research she was able to explain how graphite was made from different processes with carbon, continuing to support the coal industry.
Her x-ray research didn’t just benefit the coal industry though, she was able to apply it to the study of DNA as well. Franklin joined the Biophysical Laboratory at King’s College in London in 1945, using x-ray diffraction to analyze the structure of DNA. By assessing it under this method, Franklin could determine both the density of DNA, as well as its helical structure, something that had never been proven. Today, the famous shape of DNA is almost normalized since we see it so often, but at the time this discovery was groundbreaking.
Unfortunately, Rosalind Franklin died quite young at only 37 years old on April 16, 1958 due to cancer. At the time she was researching the DNA and RNA of bacterial viruses, which were also extremely new topics of study. Although her lifetime was short, Franklin accomplished much and left a long lasting imprint on multiple scientific fields.
Image Credit: © Donaldson Collection—Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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