![]() Her uncle, Hugh Franklin was another prominent figure in the suffrage movement, although his actions embarrassed the Franklin family. Franklin herself later became an agnostic. She was active in trade union organisation and the women's suffrage movement, and was later a member of the London County Council. Her aunt, Helen Caroline Franklin, was married to Norman de Mattos Bentwich, who was the Attorney General in the British Mandate of Palestine. Her father's uncle was Herbert Samuel (later Viscount Samuel), who was the Home Secretary in 1916 and the first practising Jew to serve in the British Cabinet. Rosalind was the elder daughter, and the second child in the family of five children. Her father was Ellis Arthur Franklin (1894–1964), a politically liberal London banker who taught at the city's Working Men's College, and her mother was Muriel Frances Waley (1894–1976). She died in 1958 at the age of 37 of ovarian cancer.įranklin was born in Notting Hill, London, into an affluent and influential British Jewish family. After finishing her portion of the work on DNA, Franklin led pioneering work on the tobacco mosaic virus and the polio virus. Watson has suggested that ideally Franklin would have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Maurice Wilkins. However, her work was published third, in the series of three DNA Nature articles, led by the paper of Watson and Crick which only hinted at her contribution to their hypothesis. Moreover, it was a report of Franklin's that convinced Crick and Watson that the backbones had to be on the outside, which was crucial since before this both they and Linus Pauling had independently generated non-illuminating models with the chains inside and the bases pointing outwards. Unpublished drafts of her papers (written just as she was arranging to leave King's College London) show that she had independently determined the overall B-form of the DNA helix and the location of the phosphate groups on the outside of the structure. This image provided valuable insight into the DNA structure, but Franklin's scientific contributions to the discovery of the double helix are often overlooked. Franklin's images of X-ray diffraction confirming the helical structure of DNA were shown to Watson without her approval or knowledge. Franklin is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA which led to the discovery of the DNA double helix.Īccording to Francis Crick, her data were key in determining the structure and formulating Crick and Watson's 1953 model regarding the structure of DNA. Her DNA work achieved the most fame because DNA plays an essential role in cell metabolism and genetics, and the discovery of its structure helped her co-workers understand how genetic information is passed from parents to their offspring. Rosalind Elsie Franklin was an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer who made critical contributions to the understanding of the fine molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite. Main achievements: Identification of the DNA molecular structure.
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