Rosalind Franklin

This woman’s research was stolen by two men who won a Nobel Prize without crediting her.

Rosalind Franklin was born in 1920, in London.

By eleven, she was studying physics and chemistry, at a time when most girls were steered toward piano lessons.

In 1938, she entered Cambridge to study natural sciences.

During WWII, she applied her skills where it mattered: researching the porosity of coal for gas masks.

That work earned her a PhD.

Then she joined Jacques Mering’s lab and mastered X-ray crystallography.

In 1951, she was hired by John Randall at King’s College to apply X-ray diffraction to DNA.

She was replacing Maurice Wilkins on the project and inherited his PhD student, Raymond Gosling.

She upgraded the lab’s camera, built a humidity-controlled chamber, and started producing DNA diffraction images.

She discovered DNA had two forms: “A” (dry and ordered) and “B” (wet and helical).

She measured the repeating structure, showed the phosphates were on the outside, and suspected the molecule contained two or more parallel chains.

In May 1952, Rosalind and Gosling captured Photo 51. A stunning X-ray image of the B form of DNA.

It was the best evidence of a helix anyone had ever produced.

Meanwhile, at Cambridge, Watson and Crick were speculating.

Their early models were wrong.

In early 1953, Franklin was preparing to leave King’s College for a new post at Birkbeck.

That’s when Maurice Wilkins took Photo 51, without her knowledge, and showed it to James Watson.

Shortly after, Max Perutz, Crick’s thesis supervisor, handed him a confidential MRC report.

It contained Franklin’s unpublished data:
– DNA’s unit cell dimensions
– The C2 symmetry
– The 34 Å repeat distance
– The position of the phosphate groups

Watson and Crick completed their model in just six weeks and rushed it to Nature for publication.

They gave Rosalind a vague footnote, saying they were “stimulated by general knowledge” of her work.

No mention of the stolen report (how surprising).

By then, Franklin was gone from King’s and had no idea her research had been used behind her back.

At 35, she was diagnosed with ovarian tumors.

She died two years later.

Watson, Crick, and Wilkins eventually received the Nobel Prize for “discovering” the structure of DNA.

None of them mentioned Franklin.

Then came The Double Helix, Watson’s memoir, where he called her “Rosy” (a name she despised) and painted her as unfeminine and oblivious to her own discovery.

It took decades and her notebooks and lab records for the truth to reemerge.

Franklin had concluded DNA was a double helix.

And she even hypothesized that an “infinite variety of nucleotide sequences” could explain heredity.

She was about to publish the answer.

And credit was taken.

Think this was a rare injustice?

It wasn’t.

There’s a name for what happened to Rosalind Franklin: the Matilda Effect.

When women’s scientific work is ignored, erased, or claimed by men.