Hack to the Past: Rosalind Franklin
By Anita Raj, Columbia SEAS ‘27
A series on influential women and POC in STEM.
Early Life
Rosalind Franklin was born on July 25, 1920 into a Jewish family before World War II in London. Known as a bright young girl, Franklin attended St. Paul’s School for Girls, focused on preparing women for careers rather than marriage, and demonstrated a talent for math and science. While her father wished for her to go into social work, Franklin decided to become a scientist.
Franklin earned her undegraduate degree from Newnham College (a women’s school at Cambridge University). Despite the war taking the attention of some of her professors while others were detained as aliens, she continued her research after earning a grant from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and focused on microstructures of coal and carbon, as well as their permeability, for the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA). She earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1945.
Career
Franklin started her career in Paris at the Laborataire Central in x-ray chromatography but soon moved back to London to work in the basement laboratory of King’s College, helping graduate student Raymond Gosling with x-ray equipment. Gosling and Franklin successfully studied DNA, with Franklin taking clear x-ray defraction pictures of fine DNA. She realized she could take “wet” and “dry” pictures of DNA and found that while “dry” pictures showed more the detail, the “wet pictures” revealed the helical structure of DNA.
Meanwhile, her supervisor, James Watson, was not pleased with the technical prowess of his female assistant. Watson spent most of his time in the nearby Cavendish Laboratory with partner Francis Crick working on the same project. During a conference where Watson and Crick’s work was diplayed, Franklin heavily criticized it, for she held evidence to support her proposed DNA structure while others did not.
Franklin grew unhappy at King’s College and decided to move to Birkbeck College instead. After she moved, Watson discovered her notes and the famous Photo 51, which revealed the double helix she captured. Watson took possession of the image and claimed ownership for its discovery. Part of Franklin’s agreement to leave King’s College was that she would no longer study DNA, so she focused on virology, specifically tobacco mosaic virus and polio.
Legacy
On April 16, 1958, Franklin died of ovarian cancer. While Watson and Crick would earn the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for her work, Franklin’s contribution would soon be discovered. In Watson’s memoir, The Double Helix, he created a character modeled after Franklin and antogonized her. In 1975, Franklin’s friend Anne Sayre angrily published Franklin’s biography in response, highlighting her true discovery of the double helix.
In Franklin’s words, “In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall succeed in our aims: the improvement of mankind.”
