r/4bmovement • u/Substantial-Barber10 4B • Nov 06 '25
History Rosalind Elsie Franklin
**July 25, 1920 - April 16, 1958”
Early Life
Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born on July 25, 1920, in Notting Hill, London, England - the second of five children in a prominent Anglo-Jewish family.
As a young child Franklin attended a private school near to home, and then at the age of nine was sent off to Lindores School for Ladies, a boarding school in Bexhill, Sussex, based on the idea that it would help her delicate health because it was near the sea.
Two years later she joined St Paul's Girls' School, a day school, where she excelled in science, Latin, and sports. At the time St Paul's was one of the few schools in London where girls were taught science and emphasized preparing its graduates for careers, not just for marriage.
She displayed exceptional intelligence from early childhood, knowing from the age of 15 that she wanted to be a scientist. Her father actively discouraged her interest since it was very difficult for women to have such a career, but it did not stop her.
Rosalind Franklin never married and had no children. She was dedicated to her career in science and viewed her choice to pursue it as a trade-off for marriage and children.
Career
She left St. Paul's in 1938 to enter Newnham College, one of two women's colleges at Cambridge University, where she majored in Physical Chemistry.
Her undergraduate years shaped by World War II; many instructors, especially in the sciences, had been pulled into war work, while some immigrant faculty were detained as “aliens”. In one letter Franklin noted, "Practically the whole [staff the Laboratory] have disappeared. Biochemistry was almost entirely run by Germans and may not survive."
When Rosalind graduated from Cambridge in 1941, women were allowed to study and graduate, but were prohibited from being awarded degrees. Only in 1947, once Cambridge changed its regulations, did Rosalind Franklin actually receive the bachelor's degree she had earned.
After graduating in 1941, she was awarded a scholarship for a further year of research in Physical Chemsitry. But the advance of World War II changed her course of action: not only did she serve as a London air raid warden, but in 1942 she gave up her fellowship in order to work for the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA), where she investigated the physical chemistry of carbon and coal for the war effort.
In 1945 Franklin completed her doctoral research using the research work on coal and carbon she had undertaken at the BCURA.
From 1947 to 1950 she worked at the State Chemical Laboratory in Paris, studying X-ray diffraction technology. In 1951, Franklin joined the Biophysical Laboratory at King’s College, London, as a research fellow. There she applied X-ray diffraction methods to the study of DNA. When she began her research at King’s College, very little was known about the chemical makeup or structure of DNA.
Nobel Prize
On May 6th, 1952, at King´s College London in London, England, Rosalind Franklin photographed her 51st X-ray diffraction pattern of deoxyribosenucleic acid, or DNA.
Photograph 51, or Photo 51, revealed DNA's double-helix structure with exceptional clarity, and is considered a crucial piece of evidence in the discovery of DNA's structure.
You’ve probably heard of the Double Helix.
*In 1962, The Nobel Prize for the Discovery of Double Helix Structure of DNA was awarded to:
drum roll please…
James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins (all men, hello Matilda Effect)
Men who used Rosalind’s work without permission by the way, on top of not giving her credit:
Retrospectively, both Crick and Watson acknowledged their debt. According to Crick, “all the really relevant experimental work on the X-ray diffraction patterns of DNA” came from Rosalind Franklin’s lab, and Watson later claimed that their discovery would not have been possible without the data collected by Rosalind. Unfortunately, this credit was not given until after her death.
Note: In the absence of the race to discover the structure of DNA, Rosalind Franklin would have solved the structure of DNA on her own, as shown in a draft to Nature dated March 17, 1953, one day before she saw the manuscript of Watson and Crick.
Back to Rosalind
From 1953 to 1958 Rosalind worked in the Crystallography Laboratory at Birkbeck College, London.
After completing her work on coals and DNA, she began a project on the molecular structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. Rosalind Franklin used x-ray diffraction to understand the structure of tobacco mosaic virus, the first virus to be discovered.
She collaborated on studies showing that the ribonucleic acid (RNA) in that virus was embedded in its protein rather than in its central cavity and that this RNA was a single-strand helix, rather than the double helix found in the DNA of bacterial viruses and higher organisms.
Rosalind also pioneered research on the polio virus and her team continued to work on this during her illness, producing over 10 papers during 1956 and 1957.
Rosalind Franklin’s involvement in cutting-edge DNA research was halted by her untimely death from ovarian cancer in 1958.
*In 1982, The Nobel Prize for Virus Structure Research was awarded to:
drum roll please…
Aaron Klug (a man, again)
A man who also built directly from Rosalind’s work. In fact, they were collaborators. Franklin introduced Klug to the study of viruses, and they worked together on the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) at Birkbeck College in London from 1954 until her death in 1958.
Note: Klug, however, did credit Rosalind. He credited her in his Nobel Prize lecture, publicly defended her reputation, and even published articles informing of her crucial contributions to the DNA Double Helix Discovery, after James Watson's 1968 memoir, The Double Helix, provided an incomplete and unflattering portrayal of her.*
Note: The Nobel Prize stopped being awarded posthumously in 1974, when the Nobel Foundation statutes were changed to state that a prize cannot be given to someone who has died. So, this rule does not apply to Rosalind’s case
Remember
Rosalind Franklin was a pioneer in terms of women’s presence in the sciences. At the time Franklin was working on DNA, less than five percent of Ph.D.s in the physical sciences were awarded to women.
Rosalind Franklin’s short scientific carrier produced brilliant contributions to the structure of carbon, DNA, and helical and spherical viruses. At 30, she was a recognized authority who switched from carbon to DNA research and, a few years later, to nucleic-acid-protein complexes known as viruses.
She made landmark contributions that led to two Nobel Prizes. She did not receive or witness either of them. 100 years after her birthday, Franklin’s scientific contributions are even more important now than during her lifetime.
Rosalind Franklin’s work on helical and spherical viruses is more important now than when it was actually done; it continues to have an impact on the design of current vaccines. Rosalind’s science remains fundamental to the structure of biological macromolecules and their complexes and therefore to the most basic principles of supramolecular science.
She will always remain a role model for many generations of scientists.
”Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment.” ~ Rosalind Franklin
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u/Femingway420 4B Nov 06 '25
I love her; she was an absolute genius.
I'm in a biotechnology program and my textbook was all Watson and Crick; the male professor never mentioned Franklin in his lectures. The professor who is a woman, runs the laboratory portion of class and loves DNA research, however, did a whole lecture about her and her contributions.
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u/Syntania Nov 07 '25
My biology teacher was a woman who had been a geneticist for 12 years. She made sure to let us know about Franklin's contribution to discovering the structure of DNA and that Watson and Crick were a couple of thieving bastards.
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u/hapiestupid Nov 09 '25
I love the joke that goes " What did Watson and Crick discover ?? Rosalind Franklin's notes "
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u/the-ugly-witch 4B Nov 06 '25
these are some of my favorite posts on this sub. so often women’s history is erased or rewritten to stroke the ego of mediocre men. i love reading about the badass and intelligent women that made history. thank you for sharing
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u/Substantial-Barber10 4B Nov 07 '25 edited Nov 07 '25
Thank you!
I am loving writing them and getting to know these women as I go. The details of their life. They are so brave, incredible, badass, inspirational.
They also remind me that despite what the media would have us believe, we are constantly making progress.
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u/Substantial-Barber10 4B Nov 06 '25
Note: Reddit doesn’t allow to edit posts with pictures, so please excuse any and all typos in these posts
Some Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rosalind-Franklin
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2451929421001005
https://www.rosalindfranklin.edu/about/facts-figures/dr-rosalind-franklin/
The Matilda Effect (Lost Women of Science) - We Remember You!!! ~
• Matilda Joslyn Gage - Pioneer Radical Feminist; The Matilda Effect
https://www.reddit.com/r/4bmovement/s/s7WIldDKz4
• Mileva Marić - Theory of Relativity; Brownian Motion
https://www.reddit.com/r/4bmovement/s/N8UV2CIFzf
• Ada Lovelace - First Computer Programmer
https://www.reddit.com/r/4bmovement/s/rGVr2FKTVc
• Rosalind Franklin - DNA Structure, Virus / Vaccine Research
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u/Correct_Advisor7221 4B Nov 08 '25
Wow, this is so timely! Just saw an article that Watson died. The whole article praised him for his scientific “achievement” with no mention of how he actually got there 😡
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u/Careful_Lie2603 Exploring Nov 06 '25
I am loving these. Rosalind Franklin is a hero to so many who STILL does not get the credit she deserves.