What she actually did
Franklin was an exceptional experimentalist. At King's College London she rebuilt the X-ray apparatus, added a humidity-controlled camera chamber of her own design, and immediately discovered that DNA exists in two distinct forms — a long thin "B" form at high humidity and a short fat crystalline "A" form when dry. That distinction was the key nobody else had. Her November 1951 lecture notes state that the structure is helical, closely packed, with the phosphate groups on the outside. Photo 51, taken by her student Raymond Gosling under her direction, is the image from which the helix's dimensions can be read directly. She also established the sugar-phosphate backbone's position and, in her later work at Birkbeck, largely solved the structure of tobacco mosaic virus and the polio virus.
Why you have never heard of her
In January 1953 Maurice Wilkins showed Photo 51 to James Watson without Franklin's knowledge or permission. An unpublished MRC report containing her crystallographic measurements also reached Watson and Crick. They used both. The 1953 Nature paper acknowledged only that they had been "stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas" of Wilkins and Franklin. The 1962 Nobel went to Crick, Watson and Wilkins; Franklin had been dead four years and the prize is not awarded posthumously. Watson's 1968 memoir The Double Helix then caricatured her as a difficult, frumpy obstruction — a portrait that shaped how a generation understood her.
Her life
Franklin read natural sciences at Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating in 1941. Her doctoral work was on the microstructure of coal, carried out for the British Coal Utilisation Research Association during the war; it was genuinely useful — her classification of coals by porosity predicted their performance — and it earned her a Cambridge PhD in 1945.
In Paris from 1947 she became a first-rate X-ray crystallographer under Jacques Mering, and she was happy there. She returned to England in 1951 to a research associate post at King's College London under John Randall, who had failed to tell Maurice Wilkins that he was handing Franklin both the DNA work and Wilkins's own graduate student. The resulting friction was structural, not personal, though it quickly became personal.
She left King's for Birkbeck in 1953 and did arguably her best work there, on virus structure, with J. D. Bernal and Aaron Klug. She built a five-foot model of tobacco mosaic virus for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair.
She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1956 and kept working through surgery and chemotherapy. She died on 16 April 1958, aged thirty-seven, the day before the Brussels fair opened. Aaron Klug took over her virus research and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it in 1982 — and said plainly that had she lived, she would have shared it.
“Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated.”— Rosalind Franklin, in a letter to her father, 1940
Things worth knowing
- She built the instrumentThe humidity-controlled camera chamber that produced Photo 51 was her own innovation, drawing on her physical chemistry background. Without it, the B form does not appear.
- Photo 51 was shown behind her backWilkins showed Watson the photograph without telling Franklin. Watson later wrote that the instant he saw it, "my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race".
- Her notebooks dated the helixHer November 1951 notes read: "Evidence for spiral structure. Straight chain untwisted is highly improbable." Fifteen months before the Watson–Crick paper.
- Her best work may not be the DNA workAt Birkbeck she determined the structure of tobacco mosaic virus and began on polio — founding structural virology.
- Klug said she would have shared his NobelAaron Klug, who continued her virus research and won the 1982 chemistry prize, said so publicly.
Timeline
Earns a Cambridge PhD for work on the microstructure of coal.
Moves to Paris and becomes an expert X-ray crystallographer under Jacques Mering.
Joins King's College London; identifies the A and B forms of DNA; lectures that the structure is helical.
Photo 51 is taken by Raymond Gosling under her supervision.
Wilkins shows Photo 51 to Watson without her knowledge.
Three papers appear in Nature; hers is printed third, reading as supporting evidence.
At Birkbeck, solves the structure of tobacco mosaic virus and begins work on polio.
Dies of ovarian cancer at thirty-seven, the day before her virus model goes on show in Brussels.
What it means now
The European Space Agency's Mars rover is named Rosalind Franklin. So are institutes, buildings and a medical university. The more interesting rehabilitation, though, is scholarly: historians working from her notebooks now argue she was not a passive victim whose data was taken, but a researcher closing in on the structure herself — and that the real scandal is less the theft than the four decades it took anyone to read her lab books.
