Qualla: Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, CC BY-SA 4.0. Rosalind Franklin's school music director was the composer Gustav Holst. He once called on her mother to ask whether the girl might be suffering from hearing problems or tonsillitis, because her singing was so poor. The girl was nine. By eleven she was matriculating with six distinctions at St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, one of the very few girls' schools in London that taught physics and chemistry. By thirty-two she had taken the photograph that proved the structure of DNA — a near-perfect X-ray diffraction image of the molecule's B-form, made on a humidity-controlled camera she had refined herself. Within a decade three men would share a Nobel Prize for the discovery built on that image. By then Rosalind Franklin was four years dead, at thirty-seven, of ovarian cancer. The Nobel Committee does not award its prizes posthumously. The story of what she did, and what was done with her work, has been the subject of arguments ever since.

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Image: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rosalind Franklin: From Notting Hill to Cambridge

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joandrés, CC BY-SA 4.0. Franklin was born on 25 July 1920 at 50 Chepstow Villas, Notting Hill, into an affluent and politically engaged London Jewish family. Her father Ellis Franklin was a merchant banker who taught at the Working Men's College. Her great-uncle was Herbert Samuel, the first practising ...

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Image: Joandrés | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rosalind Franklin: Carbon, Then DNA

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit KiloCharlieLima, CC BY-SA 4.0. Her doctoral research had nothing to do with DNA. Working at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association during the war, Franklin studied the porosity of coal — using helium to determine its density and discovering, through patient measurement, the relationship between the ...

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Image: KiloCharlieLima | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rosalind Franklin: The Photograph

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Chb assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. Franklin's critical innovation was a small humidity-controlled chamber for the X-ray camera, regulated by different saturated salt solutions. She discovered almost immediately that DNA existed in two distinct forms: a long thin fibre at relative humidity above 75 percent — which ...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Chb assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

Rosalind Franklin: What Watson Saw

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adir Benyamini, CC BY-SA 4.0. In January 1953 James Watson travelled from Cambridge to King's carrying a flawed preprint by Linus Pauling. Franklin was in her lab. Watson suggested she did not know how to interpret her own data. The argument escalated; Watson retreated, backing into Wilkins, who had been draw...

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Image: Adir Benyamini | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rosalind Franklin: Birkbeck and What Came After

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Emily Willoughby, CC0. Franklin moved to Birkbeck College in 1953 to work under J. D. Bernal, where she led pioneering structural studies of viruses, including tobacco mosaic virus and polio. Her papers on virus structure remain foundational. On the day before she was to unveil the structure of tobacco...

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Image: Emily Willoughby | CC0