Rosalind Franklin Biography
Rosalind Franklin was a British scientist who made significant contributions to the understanding of the structure of DNA. She was born on July 25, 1920, in London, England. Franklin received a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Newnham College at the University of Cambridge in 1941, and went on to earn a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Cambridge in 1945.
After completing her Ph.D., Franklin worked at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, where she studied the structure of coal and other carbon-based materials using X-ray crystallography. In 1951, she moved to Paris to work at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat, where she continued to use X-ray crystallography to study the structure of biopolymers such as DNA.
Franklin's work on DNA was instrumental in the discovery of the structure of the molecule. Her X-ray diffraction images of DNA fibers, which she obtained while working in Paris, helped James Watson and Francis Crick determine the structure of DNA. However, Franklin's contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were not fully recognized at the time, and she did not share in the Nobel Prize awarded to Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins in 1962 for their work on the structure of DNA.
Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of 37, her contributions to the field of genetics have been widely recognized, and she is remembered as a pioneer in the field of DNA research.