FRANKLIN, ROSALIND ELSIE

(b. London, United Kingdom, 25 July 1920; d. London, United Kingdom, 16 April 1958)

physical chemistry, x-ray crystallography. For the original article on Franklin see DSB, vol. 7.

Franklin was born in London on 25 July 1920, the second of five children of Ellis Franklin and Muriel Franklin, née Waley, both from families of high standing in Anglo-Jewry. The Franklins came as Fraenkels to London from Breslau, Silesia, in 1763 and became wealthy bankers. By 1868 their financial base was a merchant bank, Keysers, which provided employment for many Franklin sons. Her novel position as an upper-class Englishwoman and a Jew shaped Rosalind Franklin’s life.

Early Years . Franklin was educated in London at the academically distinguished London day school, St. Paul’s Girls’, where girls were encouraged to prepare for a career. Rosalind decided to specialize in science, one of her best subjects. Her family was startled because Franklin women were not expected to take paid employment. In 1938 she went to Newnham College, a women’s college collect at Cambridge University. After receiving a good second-class degree in physical chemistry, she chose war-related work for the British Coal Utilisation Research Board. Her published work on the structure of coals and carbons gave her an international reputation. In 1945 she received her doctorate from Cambridge with a thesis titled “The Physical Chemistry of Solid Organic Colloids with Special Reference to Coal and Related Materials.”

From 1947 until the end of 1950, Franklin worked in Paris at the Laboratoire central des services chimiques de l’état, becoming skilled at the x-ray diffraction of disordered crystalline material such as coal. At the end of 1950, at the age of thirty, she accepted an appointment at King’s College London (KCL), associated with the University of London. On 4 December 1950, John Turton Randall, head of biophysics at KCL, wrote her a letter that changed completely the direction of her planned research. Randall said it now seemed more important for her “to investigate the structure of certain biological fibers in which we are interested. This means that as far as the experimental x-ray effort is concerned there will be at the moment only yourself and [graduate student Raymond] Gosling” (Olby, 1974, p. 346).

Randall did not explain that Dr. Maurice Wilkins, his deputy, had published important papers on the deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, and considered the DNA project “his.” As Randall never showed Wilkins his letter, Wilkins thought that Franklin was coming to join his team. Yet Franklin sensed trouble. From Paris she wrote in a letter to her brother, “I far prefer here the place, the people, the life and the climate. I feel—and felt even before I came to France—far more European than English” (Maddox, 2002, p. 115).

In fact, however, returning to England was a good career move, taking Franklin into the new hybrid field of biophysics, where Britain was far more advanced than France. However, when Franklin arrived at KCL in January 1951 she hated it instantly. In the London of King George VI, Franklin’s quick, clipped voice carried a class label. According to Dr. Jean Hanson, the senior biologist at King’s College’s Biophysics Unit, “Just the way she spoke … there were people at that time who sneered at the upper-class way of speaking, and really hated it” (Maddox, 2002, p. 127). More alienating for Franklin was King’s College’s ecclesiastical atmosphere. Theology was its biggest department, with four hundred students training for the Anglican priesthood. When she was informed that women were not allowed in the college’s senior common room, where some of the staff ate lunch, she was angry. As she wrote to her American friend, Anne Sayre, on 1 March 1952, “King’s has neither foreigners nor Jews” (Maddox, 2002, p. 172). She was wrong, but her words show that she felt like an outsider.

DNA Crystallography . Franklin’s work went well. In making x-ray photographs of crystalline fibers of DNA, she was assisted by her graduate student, the amiable Raymond Gosling, and by the excellent samples of DNA fibers prepared by Professor Rudolf Signer of the University of Berne, in Switzerland, which were obtained for King’s College by Wilkins, who was away when she arrived. The only researcher working at high humidity, she took sharp, clear pictures that revealed two forms of DNA. When hydrated to absorb water, the fiber became longer and thinner. When placed over a drying agent, it changed back. This transformation explained why earlier attempts—made by Wilkins, among others—to understand DNA’s structure had been unsuccessful, as they had been looking at a blur of the two forms.

Franklin and Gosling called the longer, heavily hydrated DNA the “B” form; they called the other, shorter and drier, the “A” form. This discovery was indebted to Franklin’s expertise, for she had ordered special equipment from Paris, designed a tilting camera, pulled exceptionally thin DNA fibers, and perfected her technique for orienting the fibers in front of the camera’s beam.

Franklin did not share her findings with Wilkins because she was shocked by his ignorance of what she felt were simple hydration techniques. Trouble between them began in the summer of 1951. When he offered an adverse opinion on some of her results, she was outraged.

This was the type of dispute some could settle over a drink at the pub. But Franklin and Wilkins were temperamental opposites, she quick speaking and combative; he shy, tentative, and evasive. He thought she had been brought in to help his team with x-ray crystallography. She thought she had the x-ray work to herself. Finally, Randall intervened and gave Franklin all the Signer DNA and told her to concentrate on the A form.

Consequently, Wilkins felt shut out of his own project. On frequent visits to Cambridge, he talked with his old friend, Francis Crick, at the Cavendish Laboratory. Crick, although working on horse hemoglobin, was interested in DNA. So was the American, James Watson, who heard Wilkins pour out his troubles with “Rosie.” In November 1951, after Watson had heard Franklin describe her work at a King’s College seminar, he and Crick constructed a model of a possible structure for DNA. When Franklin and others from King’s came to inspect it, they knew at a glance that it was wrong. Embarrassed, Sir Lawrence Bragg, head of the Cavendish Laboratory, which was not supposed to be working on DNA, ordered Watson and Crick to drop it immediately.

Continuing her systematic x-ray investigation of the Signer DNA fibers, Franklin calculated the dimensions of the unit cell of the molecule and the location of its phosphates—on the outside. In early 1952 she reported that her evidence suggested “a helical structure (which must be very closely packed) containing probably 2, 3 or 4 co-axial nucleic acid chains per helical unit” (Report to Turner-Newall, in Franklin Archives).

Over 1 and 2 May 1952, Franklin and Gosling got an exceptionally clear picture of the B form of DNA, showing a stark “X” that suggested a helix. She worked out the distance between turns of the helix and the number of base pairs within it. Numbering the photograph 51, she put it aside, to return (as agreed with Randall) to the A form.

In mid-December 1952 the unpublished results of her x-ray work were included in a report prepared for the visiting biophysics committee of the Medical Research Council (MRC), the government agency financing both

Randall’s research unit at King’s and Bragg’s at the Cavendish Laboratory. Franklin’s summary gave the full dimensions of the DNA unit cell, its density, and her claim to have established “with certainty” that the crystal fell into the C2 space group that crystallogrphers call “face-centered monoclinic.”

Move to Birbeck . In January 1953 Franklin announced that she was leaving KCL in March, having negotiated the transfer of her Turner and Newall Fellowship to Birkbeck College, a secular institution within the University of London. She was giving up DNA work for as-yet-unspecified research. “I may be moving from a palace to the slums,” she wrote to a friend on 10 March 1953, “but I’m sure I will be happier” (Maddox, 2002, p. 205). Her new boss, J. Desmond Bernal, a well-known physicist and a Communist, was a brilliant crystallographer.

At King’s College, Ray Gosling, about to lose Franklin as his thesis adviser, gave the photographs he and Franklin had taken to Maurice Wilkins. On 30 January 1953, Watson came into Franklin’s room at King’s and offered to show her the pre-publication paper of Linus Pauling of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, claiming to have solved the structure of DNA. The paper, given to Watson by Pauling’s son Peter, showed that Pauling had made a fundamental chemical mistake in placing the phosphates in the center where they could not be ionized. He also proposed a triple-strand helix.

Franklin countered with her own evidence against a helical structure. Watson then went into Wilkins’s lab where Wilkins, defending the helical theory, showed Watson Photo 51 of Franklin and Gosling. One look told Watson that the DNA molecule has the form of a helix. He then persuaded Crick to try another model.

At the Cavendish Laboratory, Watson and Crick asked their colleague, Max Perutz, a member of the MRC’s biophysics committee, to show them a copy of the MRC report. When Crick saw Franklin’s evidence that the molecule belonged to the “monoclinic C2” space group, he knew instantly that the DNA’s two chains of nucleic acid must be anti-parallel.

Then Watson spotted that the two chains of DNA were linked by pairs of bases that always occurred in the same combinations. When the chains came apart, these bases would seek each other out and, therefore, copy themselves. By the end of February 1953 Watson and Crick had completed their now-celebrated model, with its twisting coils of paired atoms.

Meanwhile, Franklin’s notebooks show that at the end of February 1953, she took out Photo 51 and concluded that both the A and the B forms of DNA were two-chain helices. Her work was ready for publication just as Crick and Watson began trying to publish their discovery quickly, and to find a way to acknowledge the embarrassing fact that all the experimental work behind it had been done at King’s College. Wilkins got Watson and Crick to agree that there should be a second paper in Nature, written by himself (Wilkins), Alec Stokes, and Herbert Wilson, describing the DNA research of the three of them. Wilkins then learned that Franklin and Gosling had finished writing their own paper.

On 17 March 1953 Franklin adapted this paper in order for it to accompany the Watson-Crick paper, making three papers in Nature. She inserted the words, “Thus our general ideas are consistent with the model proposed by Crick and Watson.” So they should have been added, as the Watson-Crick model was in large part derived from her work. Photo 51 of the B form of DNA appeared as an illustration to the Franklin-Gosling paper, “Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate,” published in Nature on 25 April 1953, with no suggestion that Watson had seen it.

Franklin had no sense of having been exploited. Nor did she accept Watson and Crick’s ideas as more than a hypothesis. In the second of her two papers that appeared in Acta Crystallographica in September 1953, she wrote of “the Watson-Crick model” that “discrepancies prevent us from accepting it in detail” (Maddox, 2002, p. 223).

Work on TMV . At Birkbeck College, Franklin formed her own team of dedicated disciples (including the subsequent Nobel laureate, Sir Aaron Klug) and published seventeen papers on the tobacco mosaic virus, TMV.

Starting in 1954, Franklin’s earlier carbon work brought her several welcome invitations to conferences in the United States. In August 1956 she was diagnosed in London with ovarian cancer. She died in April 1958. That year Bernal wrote of her in Nature that “her photographs are among the most beautiful x-ray photographs of any substance ever taken” (1958, p. 154). In 1962 Watson, Crick, and Wilkins got the Nobel Prize. Only Wilkins mentioned, very briefly, Franklin’s part.

Franklin had come very close to getting the answer to the structure of DNA. That her draft manuscript of 17 March 1953, proving how close she was, should not have come to light until many years later—reported in an article, “Corrigendum,” by Klug, for Nature (1968)—is one of the many ways in which fortune did her no favors. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries she became an icon of the oppressed female scientist. Ironically, posterity would not have known of her part in discovering DNA’s structure had Watson not revealed it, however unflatteringly, in his 1968 book, The Double Helix.

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rosalind Franklin’s papers are held in the Churchill College Archives, Cambridge University, England.

WORKS BY FRANKLIN

“The Physical Chemistry of Solid Organic Colloids with Special Reference to Coal and Related Materials.” PhD diss., Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK, 1945.

“A Note on the True Density, Chemical Composition, and Structure of Coals and Carbonized Coals.” Fuel 27 (1948): 46–49.

“Influence of the Bonding Electrons on the Scattering of X-Rays by Carbon.” Nature 165 (14 January 1950): 71–72.

“Crystallite Growth in Graphitizing and Non-graphitizing Carbons.” Proceedings of the Royal Society 209 (1951): 196–218.

With R. G. Gosling. “Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate.” Nature 171 (25 April 1953): 740–741.

With R. G. Gosling. “Evidence for 2-Chain Helix in Crystalline Structure of Sodium Deoxyribonucleate.” Nature 172 (25 July 1953): 156–157.

With R. G. Gosling. “The Structure of Sodium Thymonucleates Fibres. I. The Influence of Water Content.” Acta Crystallographica 6 (10 September 1953): 673–677.

With R. G. Gosling. “The Structure of Sodium Thymonucleate Fibres. II. The Cylindrically Symmetrical Patterson Function.” Acta Crystallographica 6 (10 September 1953): 678–685.

“Structure of Tobacco Mosaic Virus.” Nature 175 (26 February 1955): 379–381.

With K. C. Holmes. “The Helical Arrangement of the Protein Sub-units in Tobacco Mosaic Virus.” Biochimica et Biophysica Acta 21 (1956): 405–406.

With A. Klug. “The Nature of the Helical Groove on the Tobacco Mosaic Virus Particle.” Biochimica et Biophysica Acta 19 (1956): 403–416.

“Location of the Ribonucleic Acid in the Tobacco Mosaic Virus Particle.” Nature 177 (1956): 928–930.

With A. Klug and J. T. Finch. “Structure of Turnip Yellow Mosaic Virus: X-ray Diffraction Studies.” Biochimica et Biophysica Acta 25 (1957): 242–252.

With A. Klug, J. T. Finch, and K. C. Holmes. “On the Structure of Some Ribonucleoprotein Particles.” Transactions of the Faraday Society 25 (1958): 197–198.

With A. Klug. “Order-disorder Transitions in the Structures Containing Helical Molecules.” Discussions of the Faraday Society 25 (1958): 104–110.

With K. C. Holmes. “The Radial Density Distribution in Some Strains of Tobacco Mosaic Virus.” Virology 6 (1958): 328–336.

With A. Klug. “The Structure of RNA in Tobacco Mosaic Virus and in Some Other Ribonucleoproteins.” Transactions of the Faraday Society 55 (1959): 494–495.

OTHER SOURCES

Bernal, J. D. “Dr. Rosalind E. Franklin.” Nature 182 (19 July 1958): 154.

Elkin, Lynne Osman. “Rosalind Franklin and the Double Helix.” Physics Today 56 (March 2003): 42–48.

Franklin, Arthur E. Records of the Franklin Family and Collaterals. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1935.

Glassman, Gary. The Secret of Photo 51. WGBH-Noval, PBS. 22 April 2003.

Glynn, Jenifer. “Rosalind Franklin 1920–1958.” In Cambridge Women: Twelve Portraits, edited by Edward Shils and Carmen Blacker. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Harris, Peter. “On Charcoal.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 24 (1999): 301–306.

———. “Rosalind Franklin’s Work on Coal, Carbon, and Graphite.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 26 (2001): 204–209.

Hubbard, Ruth. “The Double Helix: A Study of Science in Context.” In The Politics of Women’s Biology. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

Klug, Aaron. “Rosalind Franklin and the Discovery of the Structure of DNA.” Nature 219 (24 August 1968): 808–810, 843–844, 879–880.

———. “Corrigendum.” Nature 219 (14 September 1968): 1192.

———. “Rosalind Franklin and the Double Helix.” Nature 248 (26 April 1974): 787–788.

———. “The Tobacco Mosaic Virus Particle: Structure and Assembly.” Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 354 (29 March 1999): 531–535.

Maddox, Brenda. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.

Nicholson, W. Life Story. BBC2 Horizon Programme. 27 April 1987.

Olby, Robert. The Path to the Double Helix. London: Macmillan, 1974.

Sayre, Anne. Rosalind Franklin and DNA . New York: Norton, 1975.

Watson, James D. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. New York: Atheneum, 1968.

Wilkins, Maurice. The Third Man of the Double Helix: The Autobiography of Maurice Wilkins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Brenda Maddox