Rosalind Franklin: A Life in Five Chapters

Chapter 1 · The Girl Who Wanted to Be a Scientist

A family that argued, and a Cambridge degree she was not properly given

1920 – 1945 · London · Cambridge

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born in London on 25 July 1920 into a prosperous Anglo-Jewish family active in public life; her father Ellis, a banker, taught at a working men's college and helped resettle Jewish refugees from Europe.

She decided on a scientific career at about fifteen. Her father was not enthusiastic — he thought university unnecessary for a daughter — and the family argued about it. Her aunt reportedly said the girl was alarmingly clever.

She attended St Paul's Girls' School, one of the few girls' schools in London that taught physics and chemistry properly, and went to Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1938. She sat the same examinations as the men and completed the same course, but Cambridge did not award full degrees to women until 1948; she received a titular degree instead.

Her doctoral work, done during the war for the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, was on the microstructure of coal — how its internal pores affect the way it burns and holds gases. It was genuinely useful applied science, contributed to the development of carbon fibres and gas masks, and earned her a Cambridge PhD in 1945.

From 1947 she spent three years in Paris at a French government laboratory, where she learned X-ray crystallography from Jacques Mering. Colleagues describe her there as happy, fluent in French, and part of an easy scientific community. She said later that these were the best years of her working life.

Why this matters

Franklin's coal research was substantial applied science in its own right, and it gave her the crystallographic technique she later turned on biological molecules.

You have met the scientist before DNA. What would you ask her?

Ask Rosalind

• “Why did your father object to your going to university?”
• “What did Cambridge give women instead of degrees?”
• “What did your coal research actually establish?”
• “What did you learn in Paris?”
• “Why were the Paris years the best of your working life?”

Chapter 2 · King's College

A job description nobody had agreed on

1951 – 1952 · London

Franklin came to King's College London in January 1951 on a fellowship to work on DNA. The arrangement was botched before she arrived. John Randall, the head of department, had written to her describing the DNA work as effectively hers. Maurice Wilkins, who had been working on DNA and was away when she arrived, understood that she was joining as a senior assistant on his project.

Neither was told what the other had been told. The relationship never recovered, and their disagreement was practical as well as personal: Wilkins favoured model-building of the kind Watson and Crick were doing in Cambridge, while Franklin held that the structure should be deduced from the data rather than guessed and then checked.

What she brought was superior technique. She rebuilt the X-ray apparatus with a finer beam and a tilting microcamera, and — crucially — worked out how to control the humidity of the specimen chamber. That let her show that DNA exists in two distinct forms: a crowded, crystalline A form at low humidity, and a longer, wetter B form. Previous images had been blurred composites of both.

The atmosphere at King's was not welcoming. A senior common room was closed to women. Franklin was direct, argumentative in the French style she had grown used to, and disinclined to soften her opinions — behaviour that read as normal in Paris and as difficult in a London department in 1951.

Why this matters

Franklin's control of humidity is the technical breakthrough that made a sharp DNA photograph possible — the discovery depended on an experimental detail nobody else had solved.

You have the laboratory and the misunderstanding. What would you ask her?

Ask Rosalind

• “What were you actually told the job was?”
• “Why did controlling humidity matter so much?”
• “Why did you distrust model-building?”
• “What was it like being a woman at King's in 1951?”
• “What are the A and B forms of DNA?”

Chapter 3 · Photograph 51

The clearest image, and how it travelled

1952 – 1953 · London · Cambridge

In May 1952, Franklin and her PhD student Raymond Gosling, working under her direction, took an X-ray diffraction image of the B form of DNA. Labelled Photograph 51, it shows a distinct X-shaped cross of reflections.

To a trained crystallographer that pattern means a helix, and the spacings give the dimensions. The missing fourth layer line indicates two strands offset from each other.

Franklin set it aside for a time to complete the harder analysis of the A form, applying the Patterson function — a rigorous and slow method. Her notebooks show that by February 1953 she had concluded that both forms were helical, that the phosphate backbone lay on the outside, and — critically — that the A form belonged to the C2 monoclinic space group, a symmetry which implies the two chains run in opposite directions.

In January 1953 Wilkins showed Photograph 51 to James Watson without Franklin's knowledge or permission. Watson later wrote that on seeing it his mouth fell open and his pulse began to race. In February, Max Perutz passed an unpublished Medical Research Council progress report containing Franklin's data, including the C2 symmetry, to Crick — who immediately recognised what it implied about antiparallel chains. Perutz later said the report was not marked confidential, a defence most historians consider inadequate.

Watson and Crick built their model within weeks. Three papers appeared in *Nature* on 25 April 1953: theirs first, then Wilkins's, then Franklin and Gosling's — an ordering that made her data look like confirmation of their model rather than the evidence it was built from. Their paper acknowledged being stimulated by unpublished results from King's, without saying which or how.

Why this matters

The double helix is the most famous structure in biology, and the route by which its authors obtained the decisive data raises questions about consent and credit that science has been arguing about ever since.

You are at the centre of the dispute. What would you ask her?

Ask Rosalind

• “What does the X-shape in Photograph 51 tell a crystallographer?”
• “Why did the C2 symmetry matter so much to Crick?”
• “Should Wilkins have shown your photograph to Watson?”
• “How close were you to the structure yourself?”
• “What did the ordering of the three Nature papers imply?”

Chapter 4 · Birkbeck and the Viruses

The work she did after DNA, which was outstanding

1953 – 1958 · London

Franklin left King's in 1953 for Birkbeck College and J. D. Bernal's laboratory, on the condition that she stop working on DNA. She switched to viruses.

The work she did there is frequently skipped over, and it should not be. She established the structure of tobacco mosaic virus, showing that its protein subunits are arranged in a helix and — against the prevailing view — that its RNA is not in the core but embedded within the protein at a specific radius. She built a large model of the virus for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair.

She then began work on the polio virus, handling live virus in a laboratory that was not designed for it, and made progress on its structure that her colleagues completed after her death.

Her collaborators at Birkbeck, including Aaron Klug, described a happy and productive group. Klug went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982 for work that grew directly out of that collaboration, and said publicly that had Franklin lived she would very likely have shared it.

She also, notably, became friends with Francis Crick and his wife Odile in these years, and stayed with them while recovering from illness — which complicates the popular image of permanent hostility.

In 1956 she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She continued working between operations and courses of treatment, publishing steadily. She died on 16 April 1958, aged thirty-seven. Prolonged exposure to X-rays is a plausible contributor, though her family also carried a genetic risk.

Why this matters

Franklin's virus structure work was first-rate science that produced a Nobel Prize for her collaborator — evidence that she was not a one-photograph scientist.

You have the work after DNA. What would you ask her?

Ask Rosalind

• “What did you discover about tobacco mosaic virus?”
• “Why did leaving King's mean giving up DNA?”
• “What was it like working with live polio virus?”
• “How did you become friends with Francis Crick?”
• “Did your X-ray work cause your illness?”

Chapter 5 · Rosy

A book, a prize, and sixty years of correction

1962 and after

The 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Watson, Crick and Wilkins. Franklin had died four years earlier, and the prize is not awarded posthumously, so she could not have received it. It is also true that the statutes limit a prize to three people — so even had she lived, someone would have been left out.

What did real damage was Watson's 1968 memoir *The Double Helix*. In it he calls her Rosy, a name she never used, describes her clothes and lack of lipstick, characterises her as an ill-tempered subordinate who could not interpret her own data, and speculates about how she might look with her hair done differently. Colleagues including Wilkins and Crick objected before publication; Harvard University Press declined to publish it. Watson added an epilogue conceding that his first impressions had been wrong and acknowledging the quality of her science — after the portrait had already been printed.

Her rehabilitation was gradual: Anne Sayre's 1975 book, then Brenda Maddox's 2002 biography *The Dark Lady of DNA*, which used her letters and notebooks and is the standard account.

The argument that remains is about framing. Presenting her only as a victim removes her agency and her other achievements; presenting the affair as unremarkable ignores that her unpublished data was used without her knowledge.

The accurate summary is that Franklin was an exceptional experimental scientist whose results were essential to a discovery she was not invited to join, and whose subsequent virus work would probably have brought her a Nobel Prize had she lived past thirty-seven.

Why this matters

The Franklin case changed norms in science about data sharing, credit and consent — and remains the standard example when those norms are taught.

You have the whole record and its afterlife. What would you ask her?

Ask Rosalind

• “Could you have won the Nobel Prize if you had lived?”
• “How would you answer Watson's portrait of you?”
• “Is calling you a victim fair to your work?”
• “What rules should govern using another scientist's unpublished data?”
• “Which virus structure would you have solved next?”

What Rosalind changed

Franklin's X-ray images and crystallographic analysis provided the decisive evidence for the double helix structure of DNA, which underpins modern genetics and biotechnology. Her later work established the structure of tobacco mosaic virus and began the structural study of polio virus, founding a line of research that produced a Nobel Prize for her collaborator.

A debate that continues

Historians continue to argue over how close Franklin was to solving the structure independently, and over the propriety of Wilkins showing Photograph 51 and Perutz passing her unpublished data to Cambridge.

Keep exploring — ask Rosalind

• “How do you read a structure out of a diffraction pattern?”
• “What did you think was the right way to do science?”
• “What did the Paris laboratory have that London did not?”

Related lives

• Marie Curie — Two-Time Nobel Laureate
• Gregor Mendel — Father of Genetics
• Charles Darwin — Author of On the Origin of Species

Related themes

DNA and genetics · X-ray crystallography · Ethics and credit in science