Dr. Rosalind Franklin was the trailblazing scientist whose first photo of DNA revealed its secret double-helix structure. Her critical contribution however went largely unrecognized for nearly 50 years. James Watson and Francis Crick are the famous British scientists credited with discovering the DNA double helix. They came up with it, however, only after borrowing data from Dr. Franklin, without her permission and without recognizing her contribution. She has since become a role model for women going into STEM. Who was this pioneering woman scientist?
Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born in London in 1920 to a prominent Anglo-Jewish family. She attended St. Paul’s School for Girls, which emphasized preparing their graduates for careers, not just marriage. There, she demonstrated an early aptitude for math, chemistry and physics. Rosalind was an intellectually precocious child, according to her mother. The young girl decided to become a scientist when she was just 15, and told her surprised parents as much.
In 1938, she received a scholarship from Newnham College, one of two women’s colleges at Cambridge University. Her father disapproved of university education and a career for women, and refused to pay tuition! Rosalind thrived on intellectual debate, challenging others to justify their opinions and positions. Thankfully, an aunt recognized her niece’s potential and agreed to pay.
At Cambridge, Rosalind Franklin majored in physical chemistry.
She pursued her education during World War II, despite the terrifying London Blitz. As the Nazis marched across Europe, she continued her studies, while also volunteering as an Air Raid Warden.
Rosalind received her BA and was awarded a research scholarship from the Dept. of Scientific & Industrial Research at Cambridge to pursue her doctorate. For the next four years, Franklin worked to explain the micro-structures of coal and carbon, so as to use them most efficiently. She received her PhD from Cambridge in 1945 at 26. Her work is still quoted today, and helped launch the field of high-strength carbon fibers.
After the war was over, she obtained a position at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimique de l’Etat in Paris. There her mentor taught her the technique of x-ray crystallography and she went on to pioneer its use with carbon. She spent three years in France, enjoying the freedoms of peacetime, the French food, and that country’s greater appreciation of women in science.
In 1950, Franklin was awarded a three-year fellowship to work in John Randall’s Biophysics Unit at King’s College London. She excitedly embraced the shift to biochemistry and would now apply her x-ray technique to living cells. Randall asked Franklin to investigate DNA with x-ray crystallography in the laboratory of Assistant Lab Chief Maurice Wilkins. But Randall’s communication to Franklin did not convey much detail.
She expected to work independently. He expected that Franklin would work as his assistant. Their working relationship was forever muddled. They had personality differences as well: Franklin was direct and decisive. Wilkins was introverted and insecure. Within six months at Kings, they avoided each other at all costs.
In the early 1950s, the structure of DNA remained a tantalizing mystery.
DNA had been found in every cell type investigated, and was known to consist of phosphate, ribose, and four kinds of bases. Laboratories in the United States and United Kingdom competed in the race to be first to decode its elusive structure. Rosalind Franklin enthusiastically joined the hunt.
Working with a graduate student in 1952, Raymond Gosling, Franklin took high resolution diffraction photos of thin DNA fibers using a fine beam of x-rays for 100 hours of exposure. From the resulting black and white photo, she deduced the basic dimensions of DNA strands, and that the phosphates and riboses were on the outside of what was likely a helical structure.
In January 1953, Franklin submitted her Photograph 51 and her unpublished dimensional data to the Medical Research Council (MRC). She then presented it at a lecture in King’s College at which James Watson was in attendance. Watson and Francis Crick were at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University. They had been working separately on solving the DNA structure mystery. Rosalind did not know Watson or Crick and never formally collaborated with either of them. Maurice Wilkins did.
Without her knowledge or asking for permission, he asked her grad student Raymond Gosling for Photo 51 and the data; then gave them both to Watson and Crick. In her data, Franklin had confirmed the key spacing distance of the helix twists, with sugar-phosphate strands running in opposite directions. With it, Watson & Crick spent the next six weeks making chemical calculations and manipulating cardboard and wire models.
They realized crucial insights about DNA’s 3D structure – the now famous double helix.
The pair pulled ahead in the race, quickly publishing their proposed structure of DNA in the prestigious journal Nature in April, 1953. They had yet to realize that the structure itself provided the understanding how genetic information is transferred from parent to child.
Franklin had grasped, independently, one of the fundamental insights of the structure: how DNA could specify proteins via RNA. She noted, “An infinite variety of base sequences would be possible to explain the biological specificity of DNA. Science and life cannot and should not be separated.”
In the same issue of Nature, Dr. Franklin published a paper on her DNA X-ray photos. Watson and Crick never communicated with Franklin that they had seen her photo in advance. They did not reference her data nor did they acknowledge her contribution in the paper. Dr. Franklin was unaware that her unpublished research had helped construct Watson & Crick’s model.
Due to her strained relationship with Wilkins, and the less than collegial attitude towards women at Kings College, Franklin decided to leave later that year. She arranged to transfer her fellowship to the crystallography laboratory at Birkbeck College in London. There she would head her own research group. Unlike Kings College, Birkbeck was known for its classless atmosphere.
In a follow-up paper published a year later in 1954, Crick and Watson did finally acknowledge that, without Dr. Franklin’s data, “the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely,” and referred to her own 1953 paper that had “independently suggested that the basic structure is helical with two regularly spaced intertwined chains.”
This acknowledgement, though belatedly published, has unfortunately been overlooked in accounts of the discovery. She was finally recognized by her colleagues as a contributor, although late and meekly stated. In reality, the discovery was not a race won by Watson and Crick, but a joint effort. This may explain why Rosalind Franklin never publicly challenged how the structure had been discovered.
She moved on and turned her attention to another biological mystery – Viruses.
She shifted her research to their unknown structure, using the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) as a model to work with. Working with her new team, Franklin made meticulous x-ray diffraction photos of the the virus and determined it was a single-helix RNA virus.
Her group’s findings laid the foundation for modern virology. Dr. Franklin’s expertise in virus structures became globally recognized. She was requested to construct a large-scale model of the virus for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair Exhibition.
In spite of her growing reputation, as a female scientist, she struggled to obtain funding and equipment for her research. In an extended trip to the United States, Dr. Franklin visited laboratories, both sharing and gathering information. She obtained funding, got given to her in England, from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
By the mid-1950s, she was at the top of her field and sought after as a speaker throughout the world – frequently the only woman presenter. While on an invitation to speak in the U. S. in 1956, Franklin experienced episodes of severe abdominal pain. She soon learned it was due to late stage ovarian cancer, likely caused by her repeated exposure to X-rays. For the next 18 months, she underwent three painful surgeries and experimental chemotherapy, still in its infancy at the time.
During a brief 10 month remission, she continued work and sought funding for her research team.
She worked up until a few weeks before her death. Rosalind Franklin died in London on April 16, 1958 at the age of only 37. She died the day before the opening of the Brussels Worlds Fair, where her model drew great interest. In a moving tribute, Birkbeck College lauded Dr. Franklin’s “single-minded devotion to scientific research.”
Throughout her short 16-year career, Franklin published 29 research articles, 5 on DNA, and 19 on viruses. Personally, Rosalind remained loyal to her family, friends and colleagues. Religiously, she described herself as an agnostic Jew. Though a scientist at heart, she possessed a lively sense of humor, a love of cooking and nature, and was an experienced mountain climber who loved to travel. She never married, though later confessed to being in love with her French (and married) mentor in Paris.
In 1962, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins for solving the structure of the DNA molecule. None of them gave Rosalind Franklin any credit for her contributions at that time.
Dr. Franklin’s work on DNA may have remained forgotten had Watson himself not mentioned her in his 1968 memoir, The Double Helix. In it, he called Franklin “Rosy,” a hostile, arrogant woman who jealously guarded her data from colleagues and was not competent enough to interpret it herself! Maurice Wilkins became the forgotten third man who discovered DNA, overshadowed by the more famous Watson and Crick.
In 1975, Franklin’s loyal friend Anne Sayre published a biography of Franklin, Rosalind Franklin and DNA, contrary to Watson’s account. At long last, Franklin’s role in the race for the double helix finally became well known. It caste her as an equal contributor, deprived of a Nobel prize both by her colleagues and by her early death. The biography focused primarily on a brilliant scientific career and the woman herself.
Today, Photograph 51 is treated as the Philosopher’s Stone of molecular biology. Actress Nicole Kidman starred in a play of the same name in London’s West End, playing Rosalind Franklin. The discovery of DNA’s structure sparked a revolution in the biological sciences. The new science of molecular biology was born, leading to innovation, prevention, diagnosis and treatment in ways that were unimaginable in the 1950’s.
In 2004, Finch University of Chicago changed its name to Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science , becoming the first medical institution in the U.S. to recognize a female scientist. Dr. Franklin was hailed as “a role model for our students, researchers, faculty and all aspiring scientists throughout the world.” Her Photo 51 was chosen as the university’s logo. The image also graces a British 50 pence coin that marked the 100 year anniversary of Franklin’s birth in 2020.
Despite discrimination and cancer, Dr. Rosalind Franklin relentlessly pursued the answers to scientific questions that have improved health for millions of people around the world. Her perseverance and determination in the face of entrenched prejudice offers a glimmer of hope to all the underrepresented groups across STEM, and across nations as well.