ROSALIND FRANKLIN: THE DARK LADY OF DNA

The discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule is now widely thought of as the most important and far-reaching discovery in scientific history. Today, nearly all scientists agree that the hard evidence used to support Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins' revolutionary theory about DNA was based on the work of Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant molecular biologist and crystallographer. Yet in 1962, when the three men were awarded a Nobel Prize for the discovery, Franklin wasn't even mentioned. Tragically, she had died four years earlier at the age of 37. Her cancer was probably the result of over-exposure to the radiation she used in making her remarkable X-ray photographs - including Photograph 51 - the image that was the key to revealing the double-helix structure of DNA. Franklin was born in England into an affluent and influential British-Jewish family. Her uncle was Herbert Samuel (later Viscount Samuel) who was Home Secretary in 1916 and the first practicing Jew to serve in the British Cabinet. Franklin was educated at St Paul's Girls' School where she excelled in Latin and sport. In the summer of 1938 Franklin went to Newnham College, Cambridge. She passed her finals in 1941, but was only awarded a decree titular, as women were not entitled to degrees from Cambridge at the time. In January 1951, Franklin started working as a research associate at King's College London in the Medical Research Council's (MRC) Biophysics Unit, directed by John Randall. She was enthusiastic and ambitious, but was also seen as overbearing and rude by her supervisor, Maurice Wilkins, and they did not develop a good working relationship together. Franklin, working with her student Raymond Gosling started to apply her expertise in X-ray diffraction techniques to the structure of DNA. By the end of 1951 it was generally accepted in King's that DNA was a helix. During 1952 Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling worked on the X-ray pictures of DNA they had produced, this was a long and labour-intensive approach but would give an insight into the structure of the molecule. In February 1953 Francis Crick (an Englishman) and James D. Watson (an American) of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge University had started to build a model of DNA using similar data to that available to the team at King's, but Franklin was opposed to building theoretical models, taking the view that building a model was only to be undertaken after the structure was known. Watson and Crick then obtained an X-ray photograph of Franklin's (photo 51), without her knowledge, giving them an important insight into DNA structure. Francis Crick and James Watson then published their model in Nature on 25 April 1953 in an article describing the double-helical structure of DNA with a small footnote to Franklin's data. Since Franklins death there have been hundreds of books and articles written about her. She was certainly a superb scientist. However, nobody knows for certain whether she would have received the Nobel Prize if she had lived. However, she deserved it more than her boss (Wilkins) who played no real part in the discovery of the double helix, other than sharing her work with Watson and Crick! Her story also illustrates how difficult it was (and sometimes still is) for the work of women to be fully appreciated in the scientific community.