Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin produced the X-ray diffraction photograph that the structure of DNA was built on, and was dead of ovarian cancer at thirty-seven before the Nobel Prize was given for it. She was a Cambridge-trained physical chemist whose work on the porosity of coal is still cited, and who learned X-ray crystallography in Paris before joining King's College London in 1951. Her photograph 51, taken with Raymond Gosling in May 1952 after a hundred hours of exposure, shows the cross pattern that identifies a helix and allows its dimensions to be calculated. Maurice Wilkins, with whom her working relationship had broken down over a misunderstanding about whose project it was, showed it to James Watson in January 1953 without her knowledge, and a report of hers containing the crystallographic measurements reached Francis Crick through a Medical Research Council committee. The Cambridge model followed within weeks. Her own paper appeared in the same issue of Nature, positioned as supporting evidence. She moved to Birkbeck and did major work on the tobacco mosaic virus and polio. The Nobel went to Watson, Crick and Wilkins in 1962 and is not awarded posthumously. Watson's memoir of 1968 described her in terms that did more than anything else to make the case a public argument. Crick said later that she had been two steps from the answer herself. Her Birkbeck group's virus work fed directly into structural virology, and Aaron Klug, who worked with her there, won a Nobel in 1982 and said the direction came from her. The chemistry building at King's now carries her name alongside Wilkins's, which took until 2000. She did not know her data had been shown to the Cambridge pair.

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