But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment.

Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin at the microscope, 1955 © MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, CC BY-SA 4.0

The biochemist Rosalind Franklin was born in London in 1929 to a wealthy Jewish family. She graduated with a degree in physical chemistry from Newnham  Wom en’s College in 1941. She gave up a research fellowship at Cambridge University to serve as an air-raid warden in World War II. Later, she worked for the British Coal Utilisa-tion Research Association, examining the physical structure of coal. She was able to use that research to earn her doctorate from Cambridge in 1945. 

From 1947 to 1950 she studied X-ray crystallography in Paris, a technique she later began using at King’s College London to study DNA. The famous “Photo 51” of DNA, which she published with her doctoral student Raymond Gosling in 1953, revealed that the molecule had a helical structure. Around that time, James Watson and Francis Crick proposed the DNA double helix model based on Franklin’s findings, which had been passed on to them without her knowledge or consent. 

X-ray diffraction image “Photo 51” from 1952, fundamental to the discovery of the structure of DNA in a double helix, shown here schematically © Free public use | Emily Willoughby, 60251254 photo-51-print-qp867-a4 2, CC0 1.0

Watson and Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962, without any recognition of the fundamental contribution made by Franklin and Gosling. From 1953 to 1958 Franklin continued to work with crystallography to study the molecular struc-ture of the tobacco mosaic virus. She died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of 37.