Rosalind Franklin

About Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin was born on July 25, 1920. She earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1945 for physical chemistry. Her work with crystallography and X-ray diffraction provided insight into DNA's double helix structure in the famous photo known as Photo 51. Unbeknownst to her, her colleague Maurice Wilkins shared her photo without her permission to James Watson and Francis Crick. These two scientists used Franklin's photo as evidence for their famous double helix DNA model. In their publication on DNA's structure, Franlkin was simply a footnote, failing to credit her to the full extennt. In 1958, Franklin passed away from ovarian cancer. While Watson and Crick were able to recieve a nobel price in 1962 for their findings on DNA structure, Franklin continued to be unrecognized in her significant contribution to biology.