Rose was one of those unsung hero scientists who is not credited and recognised widely for her tremendous contributions...
Rosalind Franklin Is Known for DNA, But She Did a Lot More Than That
Written by Ashley Hamer
July 23, 2019
One of science's favorite stories is that of the lone pioneer who makes a groundbreaking discovery in a stroke of genius. But an equally popular story is that of the wronged female scientist, made a pitiful martyr by greedy male colleagues who refuse to give her credit. Both of these stories have elements of fact, but they also do a disservice to every character involved; most discoveries involve many people, and many female and minority scientists make plenty of contributions that don't get the same spotlight as the few that spur controversy.
Rosalind Franklin has one of those stories. She's known as the female scientist whose research on the structure of DNA was stolen by Francis Crick and James Watson and whose momentous contributions weren't recognized until after her death. A lot of that story is true — but what it leaves out gives short shrift to a scientist who made huge achievements beyond DNA.
A Prolific Career
Born in London on July 25, 1920, Rosalind Elsie Franklin was a quick child who demonstrated an early grasp of math and science, not to mention foreign languages. She was also doggedly goal-oriented, as her mother once noted: "All her life, Rosalind knew exactly where she was going, and at sixteen, she took science for her subject." Lucky for her, she attended one of the few girls' schools in the city that taught physics and chemistry. She left high school early to study at Cambridge University, where she graduated with a physical chemistry degree in 1941. After that, she took a Ph.D.-oriented research job at the British Coal Utilization Research Association. Her work there led to a doctoral thesis, which led her to get her Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1945.
After the war, she headed to France to take a position in the lab of Jacques Mering, an engineer well known in the field of X-ray crystallography. That's a technique that determines the atomic structure of various substances by shooting them with beams of X-rays and using their diffraction pattern to see the exact arrangements of their atoms. This technique became a powerful weapon in Franklin's arsenal; she used it to detail the previously unknown structures of various carbons and earned her an international reputation among coal chemists.
She loved it in France, but you can't blame her for missing home. After four years flourishing in Mering's lab, she started looking for positions back in England, and in 1950, she was awarded a three-year fellowship to work in John T. Randall's biophysics lab at King's College London, the same lab as a scientist named Maurice Wilkins, who was doing work on DNA.
DNA Drama
Here's where the story turns sour: Randall assigned Franklin to work on researching DNA with X-ray crystallography. Wilkins was apparently away at the time, and when he returned, he assumed Franklin was his new assistant. Franklin, for her part, wasn't even informed she'd be working with Wilkins. With this misunderstanding, it isn't hard to see why Franklin and Wilkins had a tense, high-conflict relationship — and it also isn't hard to see why history now remembers the female scientist as "short-tempered and stubborn" and a "challenge" to work with. (Her friend Anne Sayre, who wrote her biography after her death, took issue with that: "Her demands were reasonable and rational because she was a reasonable and rational person ..." Sayre wrote.)
Franklin's impressive X-ray crystallography skills led to equally impressive DNA photographs. J.D. Bernal, the pioneer of the technology, called her DNA images "the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken." By January of 1953, she was incredibly close to identifying the structure of DNA. That was when Wilkins showed her photographs and unpublished research to scientists Francis Crick and James Watson, who themselves were working on a theoretical model of DNA. That was enough to solve the puzzle for Crick and Watson: DNA had a double-helix structure. They published their discovery in the journal Nature a few months later. Franklin's work appeared as a supporting article in the same issue of the journal, but Watson and Crick never acknowledged her contribution to their breakthrough in their own paper.
By then, Franklin had already decided to transfer to Bernal's lab, where she worked on the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. But in the fall of 1956, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and after 18 months of treatments — continuing her work nearly the entire time — she died on April 16, 1958. She was just 37 years old.
A Life of Breakthroughs
Although she's remembered as the brilliant scientist behind DNA's structure who was robbed of the credit she was due, she made several other discoveries that changed the modern world. Her work on coal while earning her Ph.D., for example, led to the development of carbon fibers and new types of heat-resistant materials. Traveled by plane recently? Chances are good that the frame was made of carbon fiber, a development that came out of Franklin's work.
And after the DNA controversy, her work on the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) also led to important steps forward in our understanding of viruses. She created "the finest diffraction patterns of TMV available," which revealed that the virus was also shaped like a helix and showed where it kept its genetic material. But as the biggest blow to this classic story of a female scientist scorned, she kept in correspondence with Watson, Crick, and even Wilkins this entire time — after all, they were scientists working in the same field, and scientific strides require collaboration.
The story of the double-helix makes for tempting drama, but it muddies Franklin's contributions to science as a whole. She was a brilliant scientist and a shrewd collaborator whose life ended too soon, but the world is better for having had her in it.
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