Who was Rosalind Franklin????

Rosalind Franklin was born in London on July 25, 1920. She was sent to St. Paul's Girl's School where she received an excellent background in physics and chemistry. She decided at 15 years of age to become a scientist and passed the examination for admission to Cambridge University in 1938. With her PhD. at 26, she began working in x-ray diffraction using x-rays to create images of crystallized solids. This x-ray crystallography enabled the locations of atoms in any crystal to be precisely mapped by looking at the image under an x-ray beam. She pioneered this method and it led to her improving the understanding of the structure of the DNA molecule.

What was her contribution to the structure of DNA?

During a three-year research fellowship at King's College, Franklin managed despite poor equipment, to rig a system for taking high-resolution photographs of single fibers of DNA. She worked with her colleague Maurice Wilkins in the race to develop the structure of DNA. It was suggested that Wilkins and Franklin did not see eye to eye and that Wilkins saw Franklin as his employee rather than the peer she was. In March of 1953 Franklin presented a research report to her associates to update them on her work. Her presentation included her experimental results including 'DNA as two polymeric strands arranged in a coaxial helical structure' in a "C2" symmetry with the phosphates on the outside of the helix. Franklin had been able to provide an excellent x-ray photograph of the B form of DNA and was the first to be able to state these results. Personality differences between Franklin and Wilkins eventually led to Wilkin's thieving her unpublished conclusions including her photograph 51 showing the basics of the helix. Wilkins presented this material without permission to her Cambridge competitors Watson and Crick. Supplied now with this missing information, Crick was able derive that the two strands ran in opposite direction of each other while Watson theorized the complementary pairing of the strands. Both of these key observations came from Franklin's work but had been unnoticed by Franklin at that time. With this experimental backing for the double helix model of DNA, Watson and Crick pulled ahead in the race, publishing a correct and detailed description of DNA's structure in 1953.

Watson and Crick shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine with Wilkins for the discovery of the double helix despite never having done any of their own experimentation. The director of the laboratory which Watson and Crick were employed had them researching other projects because he did not want the two scientists "fishing in other people's ponds'. Yet they continued theorizing based on the works of Linus Pauling, Erwin Chargaff and Rosalind Franklin leading to quick conclusions. By "guessing the correct position and structural pairing of the nucleotide bases" Watson and Crick constructed a successful model. Rosalind Franklin had done painstaking work to uncover the photographs she had provided and yet she was not included in this award. The Nobel Prize was awarded to the three scientists in 1962, four years after Franklin's death from cancer and the rules state that the Nobel Prize cannot be awarded to anyone after his or her death and it can only be awarded to a maximum of three persons.