sciencenetlinks:Happy Birthday, Rosalind Franklin! DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin was born on this
sciencenetlinks: Happy Birthday, Rosalind Franklin! DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin was born on this day in 1920. Franklin grew up studying chemistry and physics and continued to pursue the former when she gained admission to Cambridge University over the objections of her father. She completed her undergraduate work in 1941 and her Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1945. Her work during those war years focused on the molecular structure of coal and charcoal (or, as she put it, “the holes in coal”) under the auspices of the British Coal Utilisation Research Association. She published five papers on the topic, three of them as the sole author, and helped to spawn the study of high-strength carbon fibers. After the war, Franklin spent several years in Paris, where she continued to hone her work in crystallography (the science of atom arrangement in solid materials). She undertook the study of X-ray crystallography, which utilizes X-rays in order to study how light is diffracted when it hits a crystal. She became quite adept at this technique, and, although her work predominantly had been within physics and chemistry to this point, when she returned to England in 1951 it was to King College’s biophysics program, where she was to examine large biological cells and, in a sudden change of plans, DNA. It was through Franklin’s X-ray crystallography work on DNA that revelations about the structure of DNA came to light. Scientists around the world were already at work unraveling the mysteries of the biological building block, but it was an image of Franklin’s, Photograph 51 as it would be dubbed, that provided the answers to several mysteries about DNA’s double helix. Maurice Wilkins, the head of the research lab, shared this photograph, without Franklin’s knowledge, with James Watson and Francis Crick, who were working at Cambridge. The clear images allowed Watson and Crick to see where their own research had gone wrong and to correct it. They published their results of the double helix structure of DNA in Nature in 1953. Although her photograph was attributed to her (and a paper she and her graduate student wrote appeared alongside their findings), modern examinations of their work suggest that Franklin’s contributions were downplayed, although whether inadvertantly or intentionally remains a debatable point. Franklin’s bright future was not to be fully realized, however. She died in 1958 at the age of 37 of ovarian cancer. Her death rendered her ineligible to be considered for the 1962 Nobel Prize that Crick, Watson, and Wilkins would share for their DNA findings. Learn more. Photo Credit: National Library of Medicine/Collection of Jenifer Glynn -- source link
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