Rosalind Franklin

British biochemist

• Born: July 25, 1920; London, England
• Died: April 16, 1958; London, England

Best known as a key figure in discovering the structure of DNA, Rosalind Franklin also made significant contributions to understanding the structure of viruses and elemental carbon. Despite the sexism she faced in a male-dominated profession, Franklin’s foundational place in the field of genetics has been reestablished in the twenty-first century.

Primary field: Biology

Specialties: Biochemistry; molecular biology; biophysics; physical chemistry

Early Life

Rosalind Franklin was the second child and first daughter of Ellis and Muriel Franklin, members of an influential Anglo-Jewish family whose forebears emigrated from Germany in the mid-eighteenth century. Her father was a banker, and several members of her wealthy extended family were active philanthropists, particularly in the area of services to recent Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe.

Franklin’s family, which valued education highly, sent her to St. Paul’s Girl’s School, one of the few nonparochial public schools of the time. Paulinas, as the students were called, were prepared for demanding careers through a rigorous program emphasizing academics and sports. Franklin excelled at both. Although her parents hoped that she would marry and raise a family, they nevertheless became emotionally and financially supportive once her career path became clear.

The rise of fascism in Central Europe and the outbreak of World War II formed the background of Franklin’s secondary school and undergraduate years. By the time she matriculated at Newnham College, Cambridge University, in 1938, Nazi Germany had absorbed Austria. During this time Franklin’s father headed an office that resettled refugees in London; Franklin and her brother both worked in the resettlement office.

Franklin graduated from Cambridge University in 1942 with a degree titular (meaning that the degree was in name only as women were not awarded official Bachelor of Arts degrees at the time). She received a research scholarship to begin postgraduate studies. A year later, faced with the possibility of being involuntarily assigned to war work, she accepted a position with the Coal Utilization Board enabling her to simultaneously do original research, produce a doctoral dissertation for Cambridge, and contribute to the war effort. Her work on the porosity of coal contributed to the theory of molecular sieves and to a number of industrial applications.

This work gained for Franklin a position at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l’Etat (Central Chemical Laboratory Services of the State) in Paris, working with Jacques Mering using X-ray diffraction techniques to study disordered crystals. By painstakingly examining the structure of carbon subjected to various temperature regimes, she discovered how to synthesize fibrous and glassy forms of graphite, a finding of tremendous practical importance. She also preferred the social and cultural climate of Paris to that of London, and she returned to England with some misgivings in 1950 to take a position as research associate in the Medical Research Council’s biophysics unit at King’s College.

Life’s Work

Franklin was hired by John Randall, head of the laboratory at King’s College, for X-ray diffraction studies of proteins. After arriving, she was assigned to work with Maurice Wilkins, a senior researcher, and Raymond Gosling, a graduate student, on the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Working with material supplied by a Swiss researcher, Franklin methodically determined that DNA existed in two crystalline forms, A and B, differing in the degree of hydration. Only the B (hydrated) form produced X-ray diffraction patterns, denoting a helical structure—the double helix for which DNA is known.

A rift developed between Franklin and Wilkins in the summer of 1951, when Wilkins used Franklin’s research results at an international conference to postulate a helical structure for DNA. Feeling that a less able colleague was using his seniority to appropriate her results, Franklin notified Randall, who responded by assigning Wilkins to the B form and Franklin and Gosling to the less promising A form of DNA. Thus, in May 1952, when Franklin produced Photo 51—the famous X-ray image that showed unequivocally the helical structure of DNA—she concealed it, not wanting to share the photo with a colleague she feared might appropriate her work.

Meanwhile, at Cambridge University, Francis Crick and James D. Watson approached the DNA problem on theoretical grounds, making use of data shared by both Franklin and Wilkins. As of the beginning of 1953, Franklin was probably the closest to a complete solution of DNA structure. She was also thoroughly unhappy with King’s College and had obtained permission to transfer to the virology laboratory at Birkbeck College. Gosling, faced with the loss of his dissertation supervisor, showed Franklin’s photographs to Wilkins, who in turn showed them to Watson.

Immediately recognizing the significance of Photo 51, Watson obtained a copy of Franklin’s report to the Medical Research Council and used the data therein to develop the elegant model for DNA structure and function that appeared in Nature on April 2, 1953. Franklin and Gosling’s paper on X-ray diffraction appeared in the same journal.

By then, Franklin was already at Birkbeck investigating the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. At Birkbeck she found a congenial colleague in Aaron Klug, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982. When funding ran out and a new grant from the British Medical Research Council appeared unlikely, Franklin and Klug applied for and received a large grant from the US government to study the polio virus. By mid-1957, their work had achieved such prominence that Cambridge University offered them permanent research positions.

For Franklin, however, time was running out. She became ill while touring the United States in the summer of 1956 and underwent surgery for ovarian cancer in September. She died on April 16, 1957, at the age of thirty-seven. Biographers have speculated that chronic X-ray exposure in an era of poor safety standards contributed to the cancer, for which there was also a family history.

Impact

The question of whether Franklin, and not Wilkins, would have shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Watson and Crick had it not been for her premature death ranks foremost in the controversies about her career. Since the Nobel committee took the three men’s research between 1953 and 1962 into account, the answer may well be no. On the other hand, Franklin’s later collaboration with Klug might well have produced a joint award in chemistry.

During her lifetime, Franklin maintained cordial relations with Watson and was probably unaware of the extent to which his unauthorized access to her data had stimulated his research. A decade after her death, Watson inflamed controversy with his unflattering, patronizing portrait of “Rosie” in his book The Double Helix (1968), which Crick refused to endorse. Having acquired access to the data by irregular means, Watson could not cite the data directly. In any case the key insight connecting the base-pair structure to DNA’s replicating ability was uniquely Watson’s own.

That Franklin managed to achieve as much as she did in her short career is all the more remarkable because of the difficulties she experienced as a woman in a male-dominated profession. Her success owes a great deal to a supportive and wealthy family that was able to finance a first-rate private education and subsidize her early career. It was also beneficial that Franklin entered the workforce in wartime when barriers to women in nontraditional fields were temporarily lowered. Her contributions to science, however, stand on their own merits.

Bibliography

Glynn, Jenifer. My Sister Rosalind Franklin: A Family Memoir. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. Print. A memoir from Franklin’s sister that discusses the biochemist’s background and education as well as her career, including her research prior to discovering the structure of DNA.

Lightman, Alan. The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in Twentieth-Century Science. New York: Pantheon, 2005. Print. Chapter 17 reprints both the Watson and Crick and Franklin papers, discusses their relative contributions, and traces the implications of the discovery over half a century.

Maddox, Brenda. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA. New York: Harper, 2002. Print. An account of Franklin’s life and career, drawing on personal reminiscences and correspondence.

Sayre, Anne. Rosalind Franklin and DNA. New York: Norton, 1975. Print. Written as a response to Watson’s The Double Helix. Recounts Franklin’s life and career, including her role in the discovery of the structure of DNA.