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Chemistry scientis and x-ray crystallography
(Maria Gutierrez)
The discovery of the structure of DNA was one of the most important scientific achievements in the last century, in human history, in fact. The now-famous double helix is almost synonymous of Watson and Crick, two of the scientist who won the Nobel Prize for figuring it out. But there's another name you may know too, Rosalind Franklin.
You may have heard that her data supported Watson and Crick's brilliant idea, or that she was a plain-dressing belligerent scientist, which is how Watson actually described her in "The Double Helix".
But thanks to Franklin's biographers, who investigated her life and interviewed many people close to her, we now know that her scientific contributions have been vasty underplayed. I will introduce you to the true story.
Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born in London in 1920. She wanted to be a scientist ever since she was a teenager, which wasn't a common or easy career path for girls at that time. However, she excelled at science anyways. She won a scholarship to Cambridge to study chemistry, where she earned her Ph. D., and she later conducted research on the structure of coal that led to created better gas masks for the British during World War II.
In 1951, she joined King's College to use x-ray techniques to study the structure of DNA, which was one of the hottest topics in science. Franklind upgraded the x-ray lab and got to work shining high-energy x-rays on tiny, wet crystals of DNA. But the academic culture at the time wasn't very friendly to women, and Franklin was isolated from her collegues. She clashed with Maurice Wilkins, a labmate who assumed Franklin had been hired as his assistant.
In 1952, she obtained Photo 51, the most famouse x-ray image of DNA. Just getting the image took 100 hours and the calculations necessary to analyze it took a year. Meanwhile, the American biologist James Watson and the British physicist Francis Crick were also working on finding DNA's structure.
Without Franklin's knowledge, Wilkins took Photo 51 and showed it to Watson and Crick. Instead of calculating the exact position of every atom, they did a quick analysis of Franklin's data and used that to build a few potential structures. Eventualy, they arrived at the right one: DNA is made of two helicoidal strands, one oposite the other with bases in the center like rungs of a ladder.
Watson and Crick published their model in April 1953. Meanwhile, Franklin had finished her calculations and come to the same conclutions and submitted her own manuscript. The journal published the two manuscripst but Franklin's was published after Watson and Crick's so it made look like her experiments just confirmed Watson and Crick's breathrough instead of inspiring it.
Franklin had already stopped working on DNA and died of cancer in 1958, without knowing that Watson and Crick had seen her photographs.
Watson, Crick, and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for their work on DNA. It's often said that Franklin would have been recognized with a Nobel Prize if only they could be awarded posthumously. In fact it's possible she could have won twice. Her work on the structure of viruses led to a Nobel for Aaron Klug, a colleague of her, in 1982.
This is a story of a brave woman who fought sexism in science and whose work revolutionized medicine, biology and agriculture. It's time to commemorate Rosalind Franklin, the unsung mother of the double helix.
The manual that eclipsed Rosalind's discovery
Rosalind Franklin at the microoscope making research
Part of the data that Rosalind made about photo 51
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