Rosalind Elsie Franklin is a brilliant British chemist whose X-ray diffraction studies provided a key approach to the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid and quantitatively confirmed the Watson-Crick model. She also found that DNA molecules exist in more than one form.
Rosalind Franklin: a brief biography, photo
Rosalind was born in London on July 25, 1920, the second of five children of the famous Anglo-Jewish family. Her father, Ellis Franklin, was a partner at Keyser Bank, one of the largest family-owned businesses (the other was Rutledge and Kegan Paul). He and his wife Muriel took an active part in charity and other public affairs. Rosalind Franklin (photo in the article below) studied at St. Paul's School for Girls, which prepared graduates for a future career, and not just for marriage. She was easily given mathematics and science, as well as foreign languages (in the end, she was fluent in French, Italian and German). Unlike many polyglots, she was deprived of musical hearing. Gustav Holst, musical director of the St. Paul’s school, once remarked that Rosalind’s singing improved almost to its tone. The Franklin family often hiked, and tourism remained one of her lifelong hobbies, along with overseas trips.
Studying in Cambridge
According to her mother, all her life Rosalind knew exactly where she was going, and at sixteen she chose science as her subject. Not wanting another year to prepare for college, in 1938 she left school to go to Newnham, one of the two women's colleges at Cambridge University. Her father did not, as some sources claim, resist her in this, although he could choose a more traditional course for her. At Cambridge, Franklin specialized in physical chemistry. Her student years partially fell on the Second World War. Many teachers were then involved in military research. Some emigrants (for example, biochemist Max Perutz) were detained as foreigners. In one letter, Franklin noted that “virtually the entire Cavendish has disappeared; biochemistry was almost completely read by the Germans and could not survive. ”
Help front
In 1941, Rosalind Franklin received a bachelor's degree, a scholarship for one more year of work and a grant from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. She spent this time in the laboratory of Norrish, the famous pioneer of photochemistry. In 1942, when the war was still ongoing, Franklin had to decide whether she should engage in traditional military work or conduct research in an area related to the needs of wartime with the prospect of a doctorate. She chose the latter and began collaborating in the summer with the recently established British Coal Research Association (BCURA).
Rosalind Franklin: biography of a scientist
Over the next four years, Franklin worked on the microstructure of various coals and carbons to explain why some of them are more permeable to water, gases and solvents, as well as how heating and carbonization affect it. In her research, she showed that pores of coal at the molecular level have thin constrictions, which increase with heating and change depending on the carbon content. They act as "molecular sieves", sequentially blocking the penetration of substances, depending on molecular size. Rosalind Franklin was the first to identify and measure these microstructures. Her fundamental work made it possible to classify coals and to predict their effectiveness with a high degree of accuracy. Franklin's collaboration with BCURA provided her doctoral dissertation. She received her doctorate in Cambridge in 1945 and wrote five scientific papers.
Relocation to France
After the war, Rosalind Franklin began looking for another job. She received a position in the Paris laboratory of Jacques Mehring. Here she learned to analyze coal using X-ray diffraction analysis, and also became closely acquainted with the technique. Her work with a detailed description of the structure of graphitizing and non-graphitizing carbons helped form the basis for the development of carbon fibers and new heat-resistant materials and brought her international fame among coal chemists. She enjoyed the collegial professional culture of the Central Laboratory and found many friends there.
Return to England
Although she was very happy in France, in 1949, Rosalind Franklin began to look for work in her homeland. Her friend Charles Colson, a theoretical chemist, suggested she try the "X-ray diffraction methods" of large biological molecules. In 1950, she was awarded a three-year Scholarship by Turner and Newell to work in the John Randall Biophysics Division at King's College London. Randall planned that Franklin would create a crystallography department and do protein analysis. However, at the suggestion of assistant laboratory chief Maurice Wilkins, Randall asked her to do DNA research. Wilkins has just started working with X-ray diffraction of some unusually good samples of molecules of the genetic code. He expected them to work with Franklin, but he never told her that.
DNA snapshot
Only she and graduate student Raymond Gosling were engaged in studies of deoxyribonucleic acid. Her relationship with Wilkins suffered from a misunderstanding (and possibly from Franklin's dissatisfaction with the collegiate culture of the university). Working with Gosling, Rosalind received increasingly distinct X-ray photographs of DNA and quickly discovered that the wet and dry forms gave completely different pictures. The wet form showed a spiral structure, on the outside of which there were phosphates of the ribose chain. Her mathematical analysis of dry diffraction, however, did not reveal such a structure, and she spent more than a year trying to resolve the differences. By the beginning of 1953, she came to the conclusion that both forms had two spirals.
Forgetful Laureates
Meanwhile, at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, Francis Crick and James Watson were working on a theoretical model of DNA. Without being in close contact with Franklin, in January 1953 they drew important conclusions about the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid from one of the x-rays shown to them by Wilkins, as well as from a summary of her unpublished articles submitted to the Medical Research Council. Watson and Crick did not tell her that they had seen her materials, and did not recognize her participation in their work when they published their famous message in April. Crick later admitted that in the spring of 1953, Franklin was two steps away from realizing the correct DNA structure.
Virus research
By then, Franklin had agreed to transfer her scholarship to Bernal's Crystallography Laboratory at Birkbeck College, where she turned her attention to the structure of plant viruses (in particular, tobacco mosaic). Rosalind took their accurate x-rays, working with a group of scientists, which included future Nobel Prize winner Aaron Klug. Her analysis of the diffraction patterns showed, among other things, that the genetic material (RNA) of the virus was integrated into its inner protective protein coat. This work included collaboration with many researchers, especially in the United States. Franklin made two lengthy trips in 1954 and 1956 and established a network of contacts across the country, including with Robley Williams, Barry Commoner and Wendell Stanley. Her experience in this area was recognized by the Royal Institute in 1956, when its director asked her to build large-scale models of rod-shaped and spherical viruses for the 1958 World Science Exhibition in Brussels.
Disease, demise and legacy
In the fall of 1956, Franklin was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Over the next 18 months, she underwent surgery and underwent other treatment methods. She had several periods of remission during which she continued to work in her laboratory and sought funding for her research team. Rosalind Franklin, the Forgotten Lady of DNA, died in London on April 16, 1958.
Throughout her 16-year career, she has published 19 scientific articles on coal and carbon, 5 on DNA and 21 on viruses. In recent years, she has received many invitations to speak at conferences around the world. It is likely that work on viruses could finally bring a well-deserved reward and professional recognition to Rosalind Franklin, whose illness and death prevented this.
Role in discovering the structure of DNA
Franklin's scientific achievements in both coal chemistry and the study of the structure of viruses were significant. Her contemporaries recognized this during her lifetime and after her death. But the most close attention of the public caused its role in the discovery of the structure of DNA. Crick, Watson, and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid. Then no one remembered Rosalind.
Her DNA work would probably have gone unnoticed if Watson had not ridiculed her in his 1968 memoir, published under the title Double Helix. There he presented “interesting facts” about Rosalind Franklin, depicted under the name Rosie. He described her as a rude, impudent woman - a “blue stocking” who jealously guarded her data from her colleagues, even if she could not interpret them. His book turned out to be very popular, although many depicted in it, including Crick, Wilkins and Linus Pauling, were outraged by such an interpretation as most reviewers.
In 1975, Rosalind's girlfriend Anne Sayre published a biography containing angry rebuttals from Watson's statements, and Franklin's role in discovering the structure of DNA became better known. Many articles and documentaries have tried to determine the extent of her involvement in the “Double Helix Race," often portraying her as a martyr feminist, deprived of the Nobel Prize by coworkers and her early death. However, her second biographer Brenda Maddox noted that this is also a caricature that unfairly hides Rosalind Franklin herself, her contribution to the science of the outstanding scientist and chemist and her brilliant scientific career.