biography
| name: |
Franklin, Rosalind (Elsie)
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| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1920–58)
|
| biography:
| X-ray crystallographer, born in London, UK. She studied chemistry at Cambridge, and worked in research associations in Britain and in Paris (1947–50) before joining a research group at King's College, London (1951–3). There she extended the X-ray diffraction studies by Maurice Wilkins on DNA, and obtained exceptionally good diffraction photographs using a hydrated form of DNA; these were of great value to James Dewey Watson and Francis Crick in their deduction of the full structure of DNA, which effectively created modern molecular biology in 1953. Her death prevented her being awarded a share of the Nobel Prize; it is not awarded posthumously. |
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