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Role Model: Scientist Rosalind FranklinCo-discoverer of the Double HelixHer name is not Rosy!!!! That was James Watson's mistake, and we're here to set things right. It's true that Watson and his colleague Francis Crick won the Nobel prize for their work on the double helix structure of DNA. But what about Rosalind Franklin? Without her contributions, these guys simply would not have had the right stuff. 
Rosalind Franklin: A Creative Genius, Betrayed"By the most ingenious experimental and mathematical techniques of X-ray analysis… [S]he established definitely that the main sugar phosphate chain of nucleic acid lay on an outside spiral and not on an inner one, as had been authoritatively suggested," wrote John Bernal in The Times. Bernal, a founder of molecular biology and a developer of modern crystallography, worked with Rosalind Franklin on the tobacco mosaic virus, until Franklin died in 1958. Her knew her well. Bernal said this: "…what Miss Franklin had to give was the technique of preparing and taking X-ray photographs of the two hydrated forms of deoxyribonucleic acid and by applying the methods of Patterson function analysis to show that the structure was best accounted for by a double spiral of nucleotides, in which the phosphorus atoms lay on the outside."1 Watson said this: "…[Miss Franklin] might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents."2 (continued below) |
Here's What Really Happened to FranklinHer X-ray photographs, critical to the work on the double helix, were taken by one of her male colleagues (without her permission or knowledge), and shown to Crick and Watson. A third scientist passed on Franklin's detailed notes and X-ray photographs to the scientists who were building the models, and somehow Franklin's name got left out of everything. Scientists today agree that the DNA structure would never have been identified had it not been for Rosalind Franklin's X-ray photographs. Rosalind Franklin's Science and Her Life Were OneBorn in London in 1920, she grew up to become a gutsy woman and a brilliant scientist. During WWII, she often ignored air raid warnings because she wanted to keep working in the lab. She died of ovarian cancer at 37. "…science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated," she wrote in a letter to her father in 1940. "Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life." "Rosalind Franklin has become a feminist cause célèbre, the dedicated scientist held back by her male colleagues' refusal to acknowledge her vital role in one of the most important scientific discoveries of the century."3 Let's take it a step farther, and instead of making Ms. Franklin a "feminist" cause célèbre, let's make her a "human" cause célèbre. Because we have all - men and women - benefited from her work, her dedication, and her refusal to stop doing what she loved. 
1 John Bernal in The Times
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