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Scientist Rosalind Franklin is famous for two things, one good and one bad. The good thing is that she discovered information that led to understanding the structure of DNA. The bad thing is that she was left out of the awards and recognition that her discovery made possible for other scientists.
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DNA
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Rosalind Franklin was born on July 25, 1920, in London, England. She was the only girl in a wealthy family of five children. Unlike other parents of the time, Franklin's parents treated her the same way they treated their boys. As a result, Franklin grew up not knowing that the world at that time wanted different things from girls and boys. This was both an advantage and a disadvantage to Franklin as an adult. She was very confident in her own abilities. She never doubted that she could succeed at any career she wanted. However, she found that other people did not view her the same way she viewed herself. Franklin was surprised to find that some people thought it was wrong of her to spend time on something other than a husband and a family.
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Franklin's parents sent her to St. Paul's Girls' School in London. St. Paul's was one of the few girls' schools at the time that taught physics, chemistry, and other advanced sciences. There, at age 15, Franklin decided that science would be her career. She studied chemistry at Cambridge University and graduated in 1941. She set to work studying ways in which the atoms that make up coal are arranged. An atom is the smallest part of something that still has all the traits of that thing. Through this work Rosalind Franklin earned her doctoral degree in physical chemistry in 1945.
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In 1947, Franklin was ready for a change. She went to France and took a job in a government laboratory. There, she learned to do a type of research called X-ray diffraction. In 1951, she returned to London to work at King's College. At that time, scientists knew that DNA existed. They also knew that it carried the material for genetic inheritance, the traits that are passed from parents to their offspring. What no one yet knew was what DNA looked like or what it was made of. At King's College, Franklin used the techniques she had learned in France to study DNA.
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X-Ray Diffraction |
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There have been years of debate and disagreement over what happened during Franklin's years at King's College. What is known is that Franklin's work was successful and that information she discovered was shared with rival scientists without her permission. Those rivals, James Watson and Francis Crick, used Franklin's work to figure out the structure of DNA. They made little mention of Franklin's contribution to the discovery. Franklin died of cancer just five years after the discovery, so she was not able to speak up about her work. In recent years, interest in Rosalind Franklin has increased. Only now has she begun to gain the recognition she deserved.
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Debate |
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