Coal, Carbon and Paris
Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born in London in 1920 into a prosperous Anglo-Jewish family that expected public service and argued with her about a scientific career. She read natural sciences at Newnham College, Cambridge, and spent the war years studying the microstructure of coals for the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, work that clarified how porosity determines whether a carbon is useful for filters and gas masks. It also earned her a doctorate and a reputation for meticulous physical measurement.
From 1947 she worked in Paris with Jacques Mering, who taught her X-ray diffraction applied to disordered and imperfectly crystalline materials, exactly the awkward category that biological fibres fall into. She was happy there, spoke the language fluently, and later described those years as the most congenial of her working life. When she returned to London in 1951 to a fellowship at King's College, she brought a technical command of the method that few in Britain could match. She was thirty-one when she took up the London appointment.
King's College and Photograph 51
The appointment was mishandled before she arrived. Maurice Wilkins understood that she would assist his existing DNA project; she understood that the problem was hers to lead. He was away when she started, and the misunderstanding hardened into a working relationship that neither managed well. With the graduate student Raymond Gosling she rebuilt the apparatus, learned to control the humidity of the fibres, and established that DNA exists in two distinct forms, a dry A form and a hydrated B form that had been confusing everyone's images.
In May 1952 she and Gosling recorded the exposure catalogued as Photograph 51, an image of the B form whose cross pattern is a signature of a helix. Her notebooks show that she had derived the phosphate groups lying on the outside, the unit cell dimensions and the helical character. In January 1953 Wilkins showed the photograph to James Watson without telling her, and Max Perutz passed a Medical Research Council report containing her unpublished measurements to Francis Crick. Neither man asked her permission, and neither told her afterwards.
Birkbeck, and the Argument Over Her Memory
The Watson and Crick model appeared in Nature in April 1953, accompanied by papers from Wilkins and from Franklin and Gosling. The sequence of publication made her evidence look like confirmation of someone else's insight rather than the foundation of it. She left King's for Birkbeck College under J. D. Bernal, where she did outstanding work on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus and began on polio, collaborating with Aaron Klug, who won a Nobel Prize in 1982 and credited her formation of the group.
She died of ovarian cancer in April 1958, aged thirty-seven, after years of unshielded exposure to X-rays that may well have contributed. The 1962 Nobel Prize went to Watson, Crick and Wilkins, and the rules exclude posthumous awards. Watson's memoir of 1968 caricatured her, and the correction has sometimes overshot into a story of pure theft. Recent archival work argues for something more uncomfortable: a genuine if unequal collaboration in which she was never told what was being taken. Her own notebooks show a scientist closing steadily on the answer.
