Guest Author - Alegra Bartzat

How does that saying go? Behind every great man is an even greater woman?

Rosalind Franklin is the infamous woman behind the famous Watson and Crick. Rosalind Franklin began her career in Paris, studying the structure of coal. She transferred to a biological research position at King’s College in London in the early 1950s. She faced discrimination against women in science that was typical in her day, such being awarded a titular degree because bachelor’s degrees were not given to women and being mistaken as an assistant instead of a researcher by the men who’s teams she joined.

To reveal the locations of atoms in crystalline structures, she used x-ray crystallography. She worked with a team of scientists applying this technique to biological molecules, whereas it had previously been used only for non-living crystals. Through this technique Franklin published an article stating that the sugar-phosphate support structures of DNA occurred on the outside of the molecule. She also discovered the helix structure of DNA through this same procedure. Though this data was presented at a scientific seminar, it was not made public or shared with other scientists in full. However, the data was passed along through the hands of Maurice Wilkins, a leading scientist at King’s to Franklin’s colleagues (and competitors, as the case was and still is in research science that colleagues who are not in direct collaboration are inherently competitors as well) Watson and Crick.

Franklin at King’s and Watson and Crick at Cambridge then began a race to the end to discover the complete structure of DNA. Unfortunately for Franklin, who was very dearly close to discovering the structure completely on her own research, Watson and Crick combined her data with other scientists’ data and beat her to the prize. In 1953 Watson and Crick published an article in Nature, sharing the double-helix structure of DNA with the world, and giving no credit to Franklin and minimal credit to the other scientists whose data they used. Not to say they didn’t do hard work on their own, they just didn’t properly acknowledge those who helped them get there.

Franklin published a corroborating report later that year, but did not gain significant credit for the role she played in this important scientific discovery for many years. She continued to do biological research, though she moved to a different lab at Birkbeck College shortly after the structure was discovered.

Her later research did not contribute to such perspective shattering scientific discoveries as the DNA double helix, but she did contribute to important research on the Tobacco Mosaic Virus and TMV virus

While Watson and Crick earned the Nobel Prize for this discovery in 1962, Franklin had passed away from abdominal cancer in 1958. The Nobel Prize cannot be awarded posthumously. Franklin did not receive much public acknowledgement for her contribution to understanding the structure of DNA in her lifetime, though she had a successful career and much respect in her research circles and many other publications that credit her as an important scientist in her day. In recent years, and especially since the Nobel Prize awarded to Watson and Crick, Franklin has earned her share of the scientific community pie.