Rosalind Franklin Facts
Rosalind Franklin Facts
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| Interesting Rosalind Franklin Facts: |
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| Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born in Notting Hill, London, to a wealthy Jewish family. |
| Her great uncle, Herbert Samuel, was Home Secretary in 1916. |
| She attended private schools and matriculated at St Paul's Girls' School. |
| She was a gifted student and excelled in science, Latin, and sports. |
| She matriculated in 1938 and earned six distinctions and a scholarship to college. |
| In 1941 she graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied the Natural Sciences Tripos. |
| She received a research fellowship to the University of Cambridge physical chemistry laboratory. |
| Her mentor there was Ronald Norrish, the winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. |
| In 1942 she accepted a fellowship to the British Coal Utilisation Research Association. |
| In 1945 she earned her PhD with a thesis titled, The physical chemistry of solid organic colloids with special reference to coal. |
| In 1947 she did postdoctoral work in Paris where she continued improving her skills in X-ray crystallography. |
| In 1950 she received a fellowship to work at King's College, London and in 1951 she began work as a research associate in the Medical Research Council's Biophysics Unit. |
| Her X-ray diffraction images of the DNA molecule were key to the double helix model of DNA discovered by James Watson and Francis Crick. |
| She also pioneered work on the molecular structure of tobacco mosaic virus and the polio virus. |
| In 1953 she moved to Birkbeck College where she was funded by the Agricultural Research Council. |
| She helped her former assistant, Raymond Gosling, finish his thesis and they jointly published a paper on the helical structure of the A form of DNA in the July issue of Nature. |
| In 1955 she published her first paper on the Tobacco Mosaic Virus in Nature. |
| In 1956 she and her PhD student, Kenneth Holmes, published their findings that the covering of the tobacco mosaic virus was a helix. |
| In 1958 she received a three-year grant from the U.S. National Institute of Health to continue her work on the polio virus. |
| She enjoyed travel and made several trips to the United States. |
| It was during a trip to the US in 1956 that she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. |
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