25 July 1920, Notting Hill (London, UK) - 16 April 1958, Chelsea (London, UK)
Rosalind Elsie Franklin, daughter of Muriel Frances Waley and banker and professor Ellis Arthur Franklin, was born into a wealthy Jewish family.
Rosalind, the second of five siblings, showed great aptitude and attitude towards studies from an early age, with excellent grades in all subjects. The family's comfortable economic situation allowed Rosalind to study at the best and most prestigious public schools in the country, such as the Norland Place School in London, the Lindores School for Girls in Sussex, or St Paul's School for Girls.
Despite the reluctance of her father, who did not take kindly to a young lady studying at university, Rosalind was accepted at Newnham College, Cambridge, at the age of 18. There she studied natural sciences, more specifically chemistry, and graduated from university in 1941.
In 1942, in the Second World War, she obtained a position as an assistant at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, a British organisation dedicated to research on coal and its derivatives, studies that were used to manufacture gas masks. This position allowed him to study coal and several of its characteristics, such as its porosity and its ability to burn.
In 1945 she obtained her PhD in Physical Chemistry with her thesis entitled The physicochemistry of solid organic colloids with special reference to carbon, moving a year later to Paris (France) to work as a researcher at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat, where she became an X-ray crystallographer under the guidance of her mentor Jacques Mering.
In 1951 he returned to London and joined the Biophysics Unit at King's College, where he began his research on DNA and the molecular structures of viruses. He stayed there for two years and it was there that he obtained an X-ray diffraction photograph of a DNA fibre, the famous "Photograph 51", which enabled the biochemist James Dewey Watson and his British collaborator Francis Crick to later reveal the helical structure of the DNA molecule.
In 1954, Rosalind decided to move to Birkbeck College, where she worked alongside Irish scientist John Bernal. She did not completely abandon the study of DNA, incorporating research into another nucleic acid, RNA, into her projects. He was also interested in understanding the structure of tobacco mosaic (TMV). These studies were published in 1955 in the journal Nature.
In 1956 her health problems began and she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer for which she had to undergo emergency surgery. Despite her delicate condition, Rosalind continued her research and published numerous articles throughout the following year.
At the end of 1957, her illness worsened again and she suffered a final relapse in March 1958. Rosalind died in Chelsea, London, on 16 April 1958 at the age of 37.
Because of her early death, Franklin never received the recognition she was due for her work on the structure of the DNA molecule. Crick and Watson, who presented the model following Franklin's results, were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 1962.
