Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin was a physical chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose measurements clarified the structures of carbon materials, DNA, and viruses. At King’s College London, she and Raymond Gosling produced exceptionally informative diffraction images and quantitative analyses of DNA fibres. Her work distinguished structural forms and constrained dimensions essential to building a correct molecular model.

Data from her group were shown to James Watson without her direct permission, and an internal report containing her results was available to Francis Crick. Watson and Crick’s double-helix model drew on several lines of evidence, including Franklin’s measurements and Erwin Chargaff’s chemical ratios. Franklin later led productive research on tobacco mosaic virus and poliovirus at Birkbeck College. She died before the 1962 Nobel Prize and is best understood as an accomplished scientist, not merely as a missing footnote to someone else’s discovery.