FEMALE JEWISH SCIENTISTS No. 3 Terry Benson

Rosalind Franklin made a crucial contribution to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, but some would say she got a raw deal. Indeed, Franklin is in the shadows of science history, for while her work on DNA was crucial to the discovery of its structure, her contribution to that landmark discovery is little known.

Franklin was born on July 25, 1920, in London, to a wealthy Jewish family who valued education and public service. Rosalind attended St. Paul's School for Girls, which emphasized preparing its graduates for careers, not just for marriage. She had demonstrated an early aptitude for math and science, and an easy facility for other languages At age 18, she enrolled in Newnham Women's College at Cambridge University, where she studied physics and chemistry. Her undergraduate years were partly shaped by World War II; many instructors, especially in the sciences, had been pulled into war work. Some émigré faculty (e.g. biochemist Max Perutz) were detained as aliens. In one letter Franklin noted, "Practically the whole of the Cavendish [Laboratory] have disappeared. Biochemistry was almost entirely run by Germans and may not survive."

After Cambridge she went to work for the British Coal Utilization Research Association where her work on the porosity of coal became her Ph.D. thesis, and later it would allow her to travel the world as a guest speaker. In 1946, Franklin moved to Paris where she perfected her skills in X-ray crystallography, which would become her life's work. Although she loved the freedom and lifestyle of Paris, she returned after four years to London where she was awarded a three-year Turner and Newall Fellowship to work in John T. Randall's Biophysics Unit at King's College London.

Franklin worked hard and played hard. She was an intrepid traveller and avid hiker with a great love of the outdoors who enjoyed spirited discussions of science and politics. Friends and close colleagues considered Franklin a brilliant scientist and a kindhearted woman. However, she could also be short-tempered and stubborn, and some fellow scientists found working with her to be a challenge. Among them was Maurice Wilkins, the man she was to work with at King's College.

It was in Randall's lab that she crossed paths with Maurice Wilkins. She and Wilkins led separate research groups and had separate projects, although both were concerned with DNA. When Randall gave Franklin responsibility for her DNA project, no one had worked on it for months. Wilkins was away at the time, and when he returned he misunderstood her role, behaving as though she were a technical assistant. Both scientists were actually peers. His mistake, acknowledged but never overcome, was not surprising given the climate for women at the university then. Only males were allowed in the university dining rooms, and after hours Franklin's colleagues went to men-only pubs. but after her death Crick said that her contribution had been critical.

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In the fall of 1956 Franklin was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. For the next 18 months she underwent surgeries and other treatments; she had several periods of remission, during which she continued working in her lab and seeking funding for her research team. She died in London on April 16, 1958.

The misunderstanding resulted in immediate friction between Wilkins and Franklin, and their clashing personalities served to deepen the divide. The two were to work together on finding the structure of DNA, but their conflicts led to them working in relative isolation. While this suited Franklin, Wilkins went looking for company at "the Cavendish" laboratory in Cambridge where his friend Francis Crick was working with James Watson on building a model of the DNA molecule. But Franklin persisted on the DNA project. J. D. Bernal called her X-ray photographs of DNA, "the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken." Between 1951 and 1953 Rosalind Franklin came very close to solving the DNA structure. She was beaten to publication by Crick and Watson in part because of the friction between Wilkins and herself. At one point, Wilkins showed Watson one of Franklin's crystallographic portraits of DNA. When he saw the picture, the solution became apparent to him and Watson and Crick created their famous DNA model. Franklin's contribution was not acknowledged,

Throughout her 16-year career, Franklin published steadily: 19 articles on coals and carbons, 5 on DNA, and 21 on viruses. During her last few years, she received increasing numbers of invitations to speak at conferences all over the world, and it is likely that her virus work would have earned awards and other professional recognition, had she lived to continue it.

Franklin's scientific achievements, both in coal chemistry and virus structure research were considerable. Her peers in those fields acknowledged this during her life and after her death. But it is her role in the discovery of DNA structure that has garnered the most public attention. Crick, Watson, and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their work on the structure of DNA. None gave Franklin credit for her contributions at that time.

Franklin's work on DNA may have remained a quiet footnote in that story had Watson not caricatured her in his 1968 memoir, The Double Helix, as a bad-tempered, arrogant bluestocking who jealously guarded her data from colleagues, even though she was not competent to interpret it. His book proved very popular, even though many of those featured in the story--including Crick, Wilkins, and Linus Pauling--protested Watson's treatment of Franklin, as did many reviewers. In 1975, Franklin's friend Anne Sayre published a biography in angry rebuttal to Watson's account, and Franklin's role in the discovery became better known. Numerous articles and several documentaries have attempted to highlight her part in "the race for the double helix," often casting her as a feminist martyr, cheated of a Nobel prize both by misogynist colleagues and by her early death. However, as her second biographer, Brenda Maddox, has noted, this too is caricature, and unfairly obscures both a brilliant scientific career and

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Franklin herself.

A debate about the amount of credit due to Franklin continues. What is clear is that she did have a meaningful role in learning the structure of DNA and that she was a scientist of the first rank. Franklin later moved to J. D. Bernal's lab at Birkbeck College where she did some of the best and most important work of her life, including very fruitful work on the tobacco mosaic virus. She also began work on the polio virus and she traveled the world talking about coal and virus structure. However, just as her career was peaking, it was cut tragically short when in the summer of 1956, Rosalind Franklin became ill with cancer. She died less than two years later.