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Physical chemist Rosalind Franklin carried out ground-breaking studies on the crystal structure of DNA, the molecule of life, which contains an individual's genetic code.
Rosalind Franklin was born in London, England on July 25, 1920, the second of five children of Ellis and Muriel Waley Franklin. Attending St. Paul's Girls' School, she decided to become a scientist. At the age of 18, she began studies at Newham College, a women's college in Cambridge, and graduated in 1941. The following year she worked with Ronald Norrish, a physical chemist who would later win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967.
From 1942 to 1946, Franklin worked for the British Coal Utilization Research Association, where she discovered the structural changes that occur when coals and charcoals are heated, thus explaining why some carbons form graphite under these conditions. For this work, she earned her Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1945, established her reputation as research chemist, and laid the groundwork for a new area--high-strength carbon fibers.
From 1947 to 1950, Franklin visited the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat in Paris and learned about X-ray crystallography. The following year, she returned to England to work at King's College in the University of London with physicist John Randall in an interdisciplinary group. Her assignment was to study DNA using X-ray crystallography. It was in 1951-1952 that she discovered two forms of DNA and that one had a helical structure. She and graduate student Raymond Gosling published a paper in 1953 on the DNA double helix. It was received by the journal Nature 11 days after a similar one submitted by Watson and Crick. Both papers were published simultaneously, and Watson and Crick later received the Nobel Prize in 1962.
Franklin subsequently joined John Desmond Bernal's group at Birkbeck College. She did not continue DNA research but headed her own research group, which became the leader in determining the molecular structure of viruses using X-ray crystallography. Her group was asked to build models of two virus molecules for the 1958 World's Fair.
Rosalind Franklin was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1956 and died on April 16, 1958, a few months before her virus models went on display at the World's Fair in Brussels.
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