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show/hide words to know

DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid): molecular instructions that guide how all living things develop and function... more

Double Helix: nucleic acid double helix is a biology term used to describe the molecule of DNA and RNA...  more

Helix: a smooth spiral curve. Helices (plural) can be either right-handed or left-handed. Springs are an example of a helix...  more

Nobel Prize: a set of awards given each year in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. Named after Alfred Nobel who on his death gave most of his fortune to establish the prize...  more

Posthumous: an honor or award given after someone has died.

RNA: an acid found in all living things that carries messages from DNA to the rest of the cell to be made into protein.

Scavenger hunt: a game where players search and gather items on a list.

Virus: a super tiny germ that you can only see with a microscope. Viruses need a host in order to reproduce...  more

Rosalind Franklin and the DNA Scavenger Hunt

In the early 1950s biologists were searching for the answers to some of the most important science questions left unanswered. How is information stored inside living cells? Could there be only one way these instructions were packaged? If there is, what does it look like? How did it work? All of these questions were an important part of biology and many scientists were racing to find the answers.

This portrait of Franklin was taken during her second visit to the United States. (National Library of Medicine NIH)

The answer came from a group of scientists who were working on their own projects as well as a few who were on a giant scientific scavenger hunt. James Watson and Francis Crick were two researchers who spent their time piecing together information that other scientists had published. They also spent time talking with scientists who were busy in their labs running experiments. One of these scientists was Rosalind Franklin (25 July 1920 – 16 April 1958). She was an expert in a technique called X-ray crystallography. Her work would hold the key to discovering the structure of DNA , the blueprint of life.

A Scientist from a Young Age

At the age of 15, Rosalind Franklin decided she wanted to become a scientist. Her father did not like this at all, because it was not considered to be appropriate. Yet she was determined and stuck to her plan. It was not always easy though. From 1951 to 1953, Franklin worked at King’s College in London. Her gender and her upper-class background made life difficult. It seems that some of her colleagues sneered at the way she spoke. On top of this women were not even allowed to enter the senior common room. This made her very angry, because many male colleagues had lunch there. However, none of this stopped Rosalind Franklin from making crucial contributions to science.

Contributions to Science

Rosalind Franklin used a technique called X-ray crystallography to find out the 3D shape of molecules. She applied this technique to different samples. Early in her career she worked on carbon and coal. Later she started working on biological subjects. She made major contributions to the discovery of the shape of DNA. After her work on this molecule, she also gave new insights into the first virus that was ever discovered: the Tobacco Mosaic Virus. She thought the virus might be hollow and only consist of one strand of RNA. Although no proof existed at that time, she turned out to be right. Unfortunately, this was not confirmed until after her death.

Two views of a tobacco mosaic virus. The side view (left) shows the helical shape of the virus. The top view (right) shows the opening in the center of the helix. Click on the image to see it larger and read more.

In 1962, James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins got the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the shape of DNA. Photo 51 was an X-ray diffraction image that gave them some crucial pieces of information. It was only after seeing this photo that Watson and Crick realized that DNA must have a double helical structure.

The problem was that Photo 51 was actually made by Rosalind Franklin. Maurice Wilkins, a colleague, had shown this picture to Watson and Crick without even letting her know. This added to the tension at the time of the discovery of DNA. Unlike her colleagues, Franklin was not awarded a Nobel Prize for her contributions to this important discovery. She died in 1958 and the Nobel Prize cannot be obtained posthumously.

While a lot of Rosalind Franklin's work used X-ray crystallography she also used other X-ray diffraction techniques. Her famous image of DNA called Photo 51 was made using a  X-ray technique that did not require the sample to be in crystal form. She used this method since DNA, like some other big molecules, does not like to form a crystal. Instead, DNA prefers to form organized fibers. Photo 51 still shows the classic diffraction pattern, but in this case the sample still contained water and was not a crystal.

Picture of the famous Franklin X-ray : Sodium deoxyribose nucleate from calf thymus, Structure B, Photo 51, taken by Rosalind E. Franklin and R.G. Gosling. Linus Pauling's holographic annotations are to the right of the photo. May 2, 1952.

References:

Janus, The Papers of Rosalind Franklin. Retrieved May 2012 from Janus

Merry Maisel and Laura Smart, Science Women, Rosalind Elsie Franklin, (1997). Retrieved May 2012 from https://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/franklin.html

David Ardell, Biotech Chronicles , Rosalind Franklin (1920-195), (October 25, 2006). Retrieved May 2012 from accessexcellence.org/RC/AB/BC/Rosalind_Franklin.html

Martha Keyes , Contributions of 20th century Women to Physics,  Rosalind Franklin, (May 16, 1997). Retrieved May 2012 but now at http://cwp.library.ucla.edu/Phase2/Franklin,[email protected]

David Goodsell. Molecule of the Month. January 2009. Retrieved August 30, 2012 from  https://pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/109

Photograph of Rosalind Franklin and Photo 51 : Ask A Biologist tries to ensure proper permissions before posting items on this website. For these images we have not been able to identify or contact the current copyright owner. If you have information regarding the copyright owner, please contact Ask A Biologist using the feedback link in the gold box to the right.

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View citation, bibliographic details:.

• Article: Rosalind Franklin - DNA
• Author(s): Martine Oudenhoven
• Publisher: Arizona State University School of Life Sciences Ask A Biologist
• Site name: ASU - Ask A Biologist
• Date published: August 19, 2012
• Date accessed: August 23, 2024
• Link: https://askabiologist.asu.edu/Rosalind-Franklin-DNA

Martine Oudenhoven. (2012, August 19). Rosalind Franklin - DNA. ASU - Ask A Biologist. Retrieved August 23, 2024 from https://askabiologist.asu.edu/Rosalind-Franklin-DNA

Chicago Manual of Style

Martine Oudenhoven. "Rosalind Franklin - DNA". ASU - Ask A Biologist. 19 August, 2012. https://askabiologist.asu.edu/Rosalind-Franklin-DNA

MLA 2017 Style

Martine Oudenhoven. "Rosalind Franklin - DNA". ASU - Ask A Biologist. 19 Aug 2012. ASU - Ask A Biologist, Web. 23 Aug 2024. https://askabiologist.asu.edu/Rosalind-Franklin-DNA

A collection of protein and virus crystals including the satellite tobacco mosaic virus. All were grown in space.

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Rosalind Franklin’s Overlooked Role in the Discovery of DNA’s Structure

By: Sarah Pruitt

Published: March 25, 2024

It’s one of the most famous moments in the history of science: On February 28, 1953, Cambridge University molecular biologists James Watson and Francis Crick determined that the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA—the molecule carrying the genetic code unique to any individual—was a double helix polymer, a spiral consisting of two strands of DNA wound around one another.

Nearly 10 years later, Watson and Crick, along with biophysicist Maurice Wilkins, received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for uncovering what they called the “secret of life.” Yet another person was missing from the award ceremony, whose work was vital to the discovery of DNA’s structure. Rosalind Franklin was a chemist and X-ray crystallographer who studied DNA at King’s College London from 1951 to 1953, and her unpublished data paved the way for Watson and Crick’s breakthrough.

An Unflattering Portrayal in Watson's Account

Franklin, who died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of 37, was ineligible to receive the Nobel, which is not given posthumously. Yet debate over her role in the discovery of DNA’s structure and her failure to be recognized for it began simmering after the publication of Watson’s bestselling book The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA in 1968 and its highly unflattering portrait of Franklin.

“Watson portrayed Franklin as this kind of evil figure—a schoolmarmish, shrewish person,” says Nathaniel Comfort, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins University who is working on a biography of the famed molecular biologist. Watson also related in his book that he and Crick had gained access to Franklin’s data without her knowledge, including the now-famous Photograph 51, an X-ray image of DNA that immediately convinced Watson that the molecule’s structure must be a helix.

Watson’s treatment of Franklin in The Double Helix provoked a robust backlash among those who viewed her as a victim of betrayal, sexism and misogyny, including Franklin’s friend Anne Sayre, who published a biography of Franklin in 1975 . Comfort argues that this view also obscures the more complicated truth of Franklin’s contributions. As he and Matthew Cobb argued in a 2023 article in Nature , a reconsideration of the available evidence suggests that Franklin should be recognized not as a martyr, but as an equal contributor to solving the double helix structure of DNA.

Rosalind Franklin: Expert Crystallographer

In 1951, Franklin joined a team of biophysicists led by John Randall at King’s College who were using X-ray crystallography to study DNA. The molecule had been discovered in 1869, but its structure and function weren’t yet understood. After learning X-ray crystallography at a government-run lab in France, she was already an expert in the scientific technique, which involves beaming X-rays at crystalline structures and taking photographs of the patterns created by atoms in the structures diffracting the X-rays. By measuring the sizes, angles and intensities of the patterns, researchers can create a 3-D picture of the crystalline structure.

From the beginning, Franklin famously clashed with Wilkins, who was Randall's deputy, and the two began working largely separately from one another. Wilkins had previously identified two forms of DNA appearing in the X-ray images; Franklin discovered that by adjusting the level of humidity in the specimen chamber, she could convert the crystalline, relatively dry “A” form of DNA into the wetter, paracrystalline “B” form. She shared these key insights into DNA at a seminar in November 1951, which Watson attended.

“Her notes for that lecture are very detailed,” Comfort says, adding that Franklin initially assumed both the A and B forms had a helical structure. “She describes DNA as a big helix, describes the two forms and lays out their differences…and [explains] how the structure switches from A to B depending on the relative humidity in the sample chamber.”

Franklin’s ‘Photograph 51’

Despite capturing clear evidence of the B form’s double helical structure—most notably in what became known as Photograph 51, taken in May 1952—Franklin chose to focus on the drier A form of DNA, which produced a much sharper, more detailed image than the B form. This focus pointed her away from the idea of a helix, because the A form did not appear to be helical.

“For a chemist and an X-ray crystallographer, she was doing the [form] that made the most sense,” Comfort says. “She wasn't a biologist, and so she didn't appreciate that in a living cell, the more hydrated B form was going to be much more present, because a cell is a very wet place.”  

In February 1953, Wilkins showed Photograph 51 of the B form of DNA to his friend Watson at Cambridge, who along with Crick was attempting to determine the molecule’s structure mainly through building and analyzing physical models. Wilkins received the image from Raymond Gosling, who worked for both Wilkins and Franklin and had taken the photo with Franklin.

Watson later claimed that seeing Photograph 51 immediately convinced him that a DNA helix must exist. “The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” he wrote in The Double Helix . Soon after that, Crick’s supervisor passed along a report on Franklin’s unpublished results, which he had received during a visit to the King’s College lab in December 1952. By late February 1953, Watson and Crick had constructed their model of the DNA double helix, which they formally announced in a landmark paper in Nature that April.

To Comfort, Watson’s version of events doesn’t ring entirely true when it comes to Photograph 51 and its importance. “Watson talks [in The Double Helix ] about realizing only then that there was an A and a B form…but Franklin talked about that at the end of 1951, and she and Wilkins talked about it openly,” Comfort says. “I think he was writing it as though the photograph was the magic key because it made a good discovery narrative that allowed him to boil down and communicate an enormously complex, highly technical kind of science.”

Franklin’s Understanding of DNA’s Structure

Comfort also discounts the idea that Franklin, an expert crystallographer, did not understand the significance of the X-ray diffraction image she and Gosling had taken of DNA’s B form 10 months earlier. “She was way too good for that,” he says.

In fact, Franklin was simply more focused on the A form of DNA at the time, and was also in the process of leaving King’s College behind for a new job at Birkbeck College, also in London. Before she left, however, Franklin started a new laboratory notebook, with notes on the B form of DNA.

By late February 1953, Franklin’s notes reveal that she had not only accepted that DNA had a helical structure, probably with two strands; she had also recognized that the component nucleotides, or bases, on each strand were related in a way that made the strands complementary, allowing the molecule to easily replicate. “Franklin’s colleague Aaron Klug analyzed her research notes and said that Franklin was ‘two steps away’ from the double helix,” Comfort says. “Given a couple more months, she surely would have had it.”

Both Wilkins and Franklin (with Gosling) published separate papers in the same April 1953 issue of Nature , largely supporting Watson and Crick’s model of DNA’s structure. The earliest presentation of the double helix that June was signed by authors of all three papers, suggesting—as Comfort and Cobb point out in their article—that the discovery of DNA was seen at the time as a joint effort, not just the triumph of Watson and Crick.

Taking Full Measure of Franklin’s Contributions

Over the next five years, Franklin led a team of researchers studying ribonucleic acid, or RNA, in viruses such as polio and the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1956, Franklin continued her work until days before her death in April 1958. Franklin also remained in regular contact with Watson and Crick after she left King’s College, even becoming good friends with Crick and his wife, Odile.

Franklin’s unjust exclusion from the Nobel Prize, combined with Watson’s decidedly sexist portrayal in The Double Helix led many to see her as a victim of chauvinism and betrayal. A more complicated view of events reveals a scientist who was an equal contributor to the discovery of DNA’s structure, as well as a trailblazer in the all-important field of virology.

“Franklin had an incredible series of insights into how the RNA is packed within the protein shell of TMV,” Comfort says. “She was widely recognized and seen as being at the top of her field.”

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Science News

What was rosalind franklin’s true role in the discovery of dna’s double helix.

Two researchers say that the chemist knowingly collaborated with Watson and Crick

Rosalind Franklin was a chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose data contributed to the discovery of DNA’s molecular structure. That data wasn’t stolen from her, newly uncovered evidence suggests.

Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo

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By Tina Hesman Saey

April 26, 2023 at 12:59 pm

Rosalind Franklin’s role in the discovery of the structure of DNA may have been different than previously believed. Franklin wasn’t the victim of data theft at the hands of James Watson and Francis Crick, say biographers of the famous duo. Instead, she collaborated and shared data with Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins.

Seventy years ago, a trio of scientific papers announcing the discovery of DNA’s double helix was published. Watson, Crick and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1962 for the finding. Franklin, a chemist and X-ray crystallographer, died of ovarian cancer before the prize was awarded and was not eligible to be included.

Many people have been outraged by accounts that Watson and Crick used Franklin’s unpublished data without her knowledge or consent in making their model of DNA’s molecular structure. What’s more, Franklin supposedly did not understand the significance of an X-ray diffraction image, taken by her graduate student, that came to be known as Photograph 51. Wilkins showed the image to Watson, who is said to have instantly recognized it as proof that DNA forms a double helix. And the rest is history.

Except that history is wrong, say Watson and Crick biographers Nathaniel Comfort and Matthew Cobb. Cobb is a zoologist at the University of Manchester in England, and Comfort, of Johns Hopkins University, is a historian of science and medicine. They uncovered historical documents among Franklin’s papers that they say should change the view of her contribution to the discovery.

Among the documents was an unpublished article from Time magazine depicting Watson and Crick as a team collaborating with Franklin and Wilkins, who were working as a pair. Overlooked letters and a program from a presentation to the United Kingdom’s Royal Society reinforced the idea that Franklin was a willing colleague who understood her data . The researchers laid out their findings in a commentary in the April 27 Nature .

Cobb and Comfort talked with Science News about their new view of Franklin’s contributions. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

SN : Why did you decide to go through these documents?

Comfort: Matthew’s writing this biography of Crick, and I am writing a biography of Watson…. And we decided as a kind of pilgrimage to go and see the Franklin papers in person….

We weren’t expecting really anything other than just sort of a perfunctory visit when we sat down in this archive room together, and they pulled out the folders. We started going over them together, bouncing ideas back and forth saying, “Hey, what’s this?”

The sparks started flying, and that was when we found this magazine article from Time that was never published. It was a very rough draft that the author, named Joan Bruce, had sent to Franklin for fact-checking to make sure she got the science right.

Cobb: So what Nathaniel immediately picked up on in the Bruce article was the way that she presented the discovery. She presents it as being an equal piece of work — that the two groups, at King’s [College with Franklin and Wilkins] and at the Cavendish [Laboratory with Watson and Crick] in Cambridge, are effectively collaborating….

It’s not [the story] we’re used to hearing because the version we have is the dramatic Jim Watson version from his book The Double Helix: “Ha-ha! I stole their data!… Little did they know but I had it in my hands.” This is dramatic reconstruction.

Comfort: If it were this way [as in Bruce’s article], it actually gives the lie to Watson’s sensational account. And we know why — or at least I think I know why — Watson gave that sensational account.

The audience for The Double Helix was intended to be high school and college students who he wanted to get excited about science.… And I have lots of examples from that book where he stretches the truth, where he takes liberties, where he takes literary license. And I can show that as a pattern through the entire book. So it also fits with the style and tone of The Double Helix .

SN : Is there other evidence that Watson and Crick didn’t steal her data?

Cobb:  What we have separately done by looking in real detail at the records — the interviews that Crick did in the ’60s and so on — is we’ve been able to reconstruct the process that [Watson and Crick] went through. Which, if you read their papers really carefully, actually says quite explicitly that they engaged in what they called a process of trial and error. So they knew roughly the size of the crystal of the DNA molecule. They knew the atoms that should be in there from the density. So they tried to fit this stuff into this size using chemical rules.

Then there’s this report [on X-ray diffraction data] that was written by the King’s researchers, Franklin and Wilkins, as part of their funding from the Medical Research Council. It was shared with other laboratories, including the head of the laboratory in Cambridge, Max Perutz [Crick’s boss]. And this is all known, so we haven’t discovered this. Watson and Crick used some of the numbers in there from Franklin and Wilkins as a kind of check on their random walk-through of possible structures….

This still looks like kind of underhand, right? Because they’ve been given this semi-official document. Then two things happened. Firstly, if you read their documents, it’s quite clear that they do explain that they had access to this document, and that they used it as a check on their models. So this fact is acknowledged at the time….

We then stumbled upon a letter from a Ph.D. student who was at King’s College, called Pauline Cowan, who was a friend of Crick’s…. So Cowan writes this letter asking him for help with something completely uninteresting. Then she says in passing, “Franklin and Gosling” — that’s Franklin’s Ph.D. student who took Photograph 51 — “are giving a seminar on their data.” This is in January 1953. “You can come along if you want. Here’s the details. But they say that they’re not really going to go into much detail. It’s for the general lab audience, and Perutz knows all the results anyway. So you might not want to bother coming.”

In other words, Franklin knows that Watson and Crick will have access to this informal report, and she doesn’t care. It’s all, “Hey, if you want it, that’s fine.” So that then shifts the optic away from they got this surreptitious access to this MRC report. So we’re back to this collaborative [picture]. Franklin doesn’t seem to be too bothered.

And then the final element … we found a program of a Royal Society exhibition…. This is two months after the publication of the papers. [In the program] is a brief summary of the structure of DNA signed by everybody, presented by Franklin.

It was like a school science fair. She’s standing there in front of a model explaining it to everybody, and all their names are on it. So this isn’t a race that’s been won by Watson and Crick. I mean, they did get there first, don’t get us wrong. But it wasn’t seen that way at the time. They could not have done it without the data from Franklin. And Wilkins. And everybody — at least at this stage in 1953 — is accepting that and seems okay with it.

Just like the Joan Bruce article said. So this changes the mood, right? We’re moving away from the Hollywood thriller that Watson wrote, where he’s sneaked some data. That version is really exciting. It’s just not true. [We’re moving] to something that’s much more collaborative, modern in some respects, about sharing data.

Today, we focus on Franklin because we’re currently interested in equality, women’s oppression, and so on. We’re also obsessed with DNA. But people weren’t back then. DNA wasn’t then what it is now. [People might think] how could Franklin not have been livid? This was the secret of life and she had had it taken away from her. But it wasn’t and she didn’t.

SN : Did Franklin understand the importance of her data?

Cobb: Franklin was very skilled at being able to move DNA between two forms; what’s called the A form, which is the crystalline form which gives really precise images, and what’s called the B form. That form is what you get if there’s much more water around the molecule kind of pulling it into a different shape. And it was very clear from her notes that she thought that the B form was basically the loss of order, that it was disintegrating….

If you study the double helix story, there’s this this kind of enigma, because there are these two forms, A and B.  Franklin studies the A form … [but] it’s never been clear to anybody why she chose that form. And then we realized it’s because she’s a crystallographer. She’s a chemist. And if you’re a chemist, and you’re trying to find the crystalline structure of something, what are you going to look at? The crystal.

It’s easy in retrospect to get in a time machine and go back and whisper in her ear, “Hey, but what’s the inside of the cell like? It’s not very dry, you know. Maybe think about the other form.” But … you can’t do that. That’s against the rules….

Everybody who wants to favor Rosalind Franklin thinks that Watson and Crick were kind of sexist pigs who stole her data. The first bit of that description is probably accurate. The second bit isn’t. They certainly were pretty rude. But they did not steal the data.

This is the popular version of the story which we wanted to undermine. That this Photograph 51, which is the B form, is so striking that Watson, when he’s given a glimpse of it, can instantly realize its significance. According to the story he tells and people who are in favor of Franklin tell, this is the moment he steals her data.

But if you think about it for a minute, you think, “Well, why didn’t Franklin get it if it’s so obvious? This really smart woman who’s much smarter than Watson is about this aspect of science, but she doesn’t get it?” And the answer is very clear when you read her notes. She did get it and she didn’t care. She knew it was some kind of helix, but that was not the structure that interested her.

What [the popular story] does is it removes any agency from Franklin. People are inadvertently presenting her as a negative version, the version that Watson presents. She’s the heroine, but she hasn’t gotten it yet. Why hasn’t she got it? Well, the only implication is what Wilkins says; that she was stubborn and blinkered, which is just not true. So we’re trying to put her back at the center of the story, make her much more human than this harridan that Watson presents her as.

SN : Do we know if Franklin complained at the time about her data being stolen?

So after the double helix [discovery], Franklin and Wilkins never question Watson and Crick, “How did you do this?” They never fall out with them. They never have a row. They never write anything. Either they were stupid and never asked the question, or they knew [that the data were shared fairly].

Then in [19]54, for example, Franklin’s going to the East Coast to go to this meeting on the West Coast that Watson’s going to as well. And so she writes to Watson, “Dear Jim, I gather you’re getting a car across the states. Can I come with you?” So she tried to hitch a ride on a transcontinental car journey with this man who supposedly had stolen life’s secret from under her nose. That doesn’t make sense.

She was on collegial terms — I don’t think she liked him — but she was on collegial terms with Jim…. They had extensive correspondence because they were in the same area of viral structure.

In the last two or three years of her life, she became very good friends with Crick and with his wife. They went on holiday together in Spain after a conference. After she had her first two operations for ovarian cancer, she went to the Cricks to convalesce. She would send Crick her draft articles and ask his advice. So she clearly didn’t think he was a pig who was going to steal all of that data.

SN: So they were just much more chill about the whole thing?

Cobb: They were all much more chill. We look at this, one, through a feminist optic. We being the world. It’s an inverse version of The Double Helix . And, two, through the optic of what would it be like today to discover this? Clearly, you’d have competing labs, they would not talk to each other, and if one of them had these data, then they would behave exactly like Watson describes it.

But that was not the world of the 1950s. Partly because DNA was not DNA. It wasn’t clear that it was the genetic material [of life]. So it wasn’t a big deal.

On Franklin’s tomb there is no mention of DNA. What there is mention of is viruses.  Because that’s the practical work that she was engaged in when she died. She had worked out the structure of the polio virus. DNA wasn’t a practical thing for another 20 years. Whereas the structure the polio virus, maybe that could save lives.

The way we see her is not how she was seen at the time. She was very famous. She got a page obituary in Nature , obituaries in Britain’s the Times and the New York Times . So many of her American colleagues were utterly distraught when they discovered that she died [in 1958]. So you know, she was a very significant person, not just for DNA.

SN : Dr. Watson is still living. Have you spoken with him or anyone else who’s still around that could offer some insight?

Comfort: I’ve spoken with him many times, and he knows about this project. But he’s not in any [physical] shape right now to be able to comment on something like this. Believe me, I would love to, but it’s just not possible.

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• Linda Hall Library - Scientist of the Day - Biography of Rosalind Franklin
• Public Broadcasting Service - People and Discoveries - Rosalind Franklin
• Jewish Women's Archive - Biography of Rosalind Elsie Franklin
• Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum - Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA
• Academia - Rosalind Franklin 1920–1958
• Famous Scientists - Rosalind Franklin
• University of California - San Diego Supercomputer Center - Rosalind Elsie Franklin
• National Library of Medicine - Profiles in Science - Rosalind Franklin
• Nature - What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure
• Rosalind Franklin - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• Rosalind Franklin - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

What is Rosalind Franklin best known for?

Rosalind Franklin discovered the density of DNA and, more importantly, established that the molecule existed in a helical conformation. Her work to make clearer X-ray patterns of DNA molecules laid the foundation for James Watson and Francis Crick ’s suggestion that DNA is a double-helix polymer in 1953.

Rosalind Franklin contributed new insight on the structure of viruses , helping to lay the foundation for the field of structural virology . Her work investigating the physical chemistry of carbon and coal led to her research on the structural changes caused by the formation of graphite in heated carbons—which proved valuable for the coking industry .

How did Rosalind Franklin die?

Rosalind Franklin’s involvement in cutting-edge DNA research was halted by her untimely death from cancer at age 37 in 1958. Franklin was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1956. She continued her research throughout her treatment regimen; however, she passed away in London on April 16, 1958.

Rosalind Franklin (born July 25, 1920, London , England—died April 16, 1958, London) was a British scientist best known for her contributions to the discovery of the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid ( DNA ), a constituent of chromosomes that serves to encode genetic information. Franklin also contributed new insight on the structure of viruses , helping to lay the foundation for the field of structural virology.

Franklin attended St. Paul’s Girls’ School before studying physical chemistry at Newnham College, University of Cambridge . After graduating in 1941, she received a fellowship to conduct research in physical chemistry at Cambridge. But the advance of World War II changed her course of action: not only did she serve as a London air raid warden, but in 1942 she gave up her fellowship in order to work for the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, where she investigated the physical chemistry of carbon and coal for the war effort. Nevertheless, she was able to use this research for her doctoral thesis , and in 1945 she received a doctorate from Cambridge. From 1947 to 1950 she worked with Jacques Méring at the State Chemical Laboratory in Paris, studying X-ray diffraction technology. That work led to her research on the structural changes caused by the formation of graphite in heated carbons—work that proved valuable for the coking industry.

In 1951 Franklin joined the Biophysical Laboratory at King’s College , London, as a research fellow. There she applied X-ray diffraction methods to the study of DNA . When she began her research at King’s College, very little was known about the chemical makeup or structure of DNA. However, she soon discovered the density of DNA and, more importantly, established that the molecule existed in a helical conformation. Her work to make clearer X-ray patterns of DNA molecules laid the foundation for James Watson and Francis Crick to suggest in 1953 that the structure of DNA is a double-helix polymer , a spiral consisting of two DNA strands wound around each other.

From 1953 to 1958 Franklin worked in the Crystallography Laboratory at Birkbeck College, London. While there she completed her work on coals and on DNA and began a project on the molecular structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. She collaborated on studies showing that the ribonucleic acid ( RNA ) in that virus was embedded in its protein rather than in its central cavity and that this RNA was a single-strand helix, rather than the double helix found in the DNA of bacterial viruses and higher organisms. Franklin’s involvement in cutting-edge DNA research was halted by her untimely death from cancer in 1958.

Discovery of a Lifetime

Dr. Rosalind Franklin was already a well-known authority in the field of carbons when she came to King’s College London at the age of 30. But her time as a researcher here would lead to an incredible scientific revelation, one that would preserve her name for the ages.

A Unique Assignment

At the start of 1951, Rosalind was awarded a three-year research fellowship at King’s College London. Her assignment? Study changes in protein solutions. She was excited about the shift from physical to biological chemistry, but before she could begin her research, the assignment abruptly changed. Having acquired a specially-prepared nucleic gel, King’s College instructed Rosalind to use her expertise in X-ray diffraction to investigate the structure of DNA. This shift in focus came from an assistant lab chief at the college, Dr. Maurice Wilkins, who had advocated for hiring Rosalind. He had just begun examining DNA with X-ray diffraction and expected to work closely with her on this research.

Interactive 3D Experience

The process by which Dr. Franklin made her seminal discovery was a complicated one, as complicated as the structure she was trying to solve.

Capturing Photo 51

Due to a series of misunderstandings, Rosalind was given the impression that she and PhD student Raymond Gosling would be the only DNA researchers at King’s College. This would eventually lead to friction between her and Dr. Wilkins and a less than collegial environment, in which Rosalind grew increasingly isolated. She focused on her work, spending her first eight months collaborating with Gosling on designing and assembling a tilting micro camera, while also working to understand the conditions needed to capture an accurate diffraction image of DNA. After many more months of refinements, Rosalind had the camera working at the level she wanted. In May 1952, she and Gosling suspended a tiny DNA fiber and bombarded it with an X-ray beam for 100 hours of exposure under carefully controlled humidity. Diffracted by the electrons in the atoms of the fiber, the rays produced a pattern on a photographic plate. Once they had this picture — dubbed “Photo 51” because it was the 51st diffracted image they captured — Rosalind performed mathematical computations to analyze the pattern in the photo that would help reveal the double helix. This put her in a dead heat in a global race to unlock the structure of DNA.

Competition and Controversy

In April 1953, Rosalind published her findings in the scientific journal Nature. In another piece appearing in that same issue, Cambridge scientists James Watson and Francis Crick announced their double helix model of DNA. Rosalind’s data corroborated this new model, but it’s not clear if she knew that her unpublished research had helped inspire and construct it. At the beginning of that year, Gosling had showed Photo 51 to Wilkins, who in turn showed it to Watson. Because he and his research partner were already immersed in DNA research, Watson immediately understood the stunning implication of the photo: The helical structure was essential to the replication of DNA. Rosalind had left King’s College a few months before Nature reported the groundbreaking discovery of the structure of DNA. In search of collaboration and a more supportive research environment, she went to work for the Biomolecular Research Laboratory at Birkbeck College, also in London. There, under the direction of her old mentor J.D. Bernal, she adapted her excellence in X-ray crystallography to the field of virology, making important contributions to the understanding of the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. Over time, Watson and Crick — and Wilkins, to some extent — would receive much of the credit for revealing the secrets of DNA. The three were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962 for “discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids.” For her part, Rosalind was magnanimous. According to Gosling, when she was made aware of Watson and Crick’s model, she said, “We all stand on each other’s shoulders.”

Rosalind Franklin: Biography & Discovery of DNA Structure

Many people recall that the structure of the DNA molecule has the shape of a double helix. Some may even recall the names of the scientists who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for modeling the structure of the molecule, and explaining how the shape lends itself to replication. James Watson and Francis Crick shared the Nobel Prize with Maurice Wilkins, but many people feel that much of the credit for this world-shaking achievement should rightfully go to someone who was absent from that stage, a woman named Rosalind Franklin.

Rosalind Franklin was born July 25, 1920, and grew up in a well-known Jewish family in pre-World War II London, and was known in the family for being very clever and outspoken. Her parents sent her to St. Paul’s Girls’ School, a private school known for rigorous academics, including physics and chemistry. In an interview for PBS’ NOVA television episode titled "The Secret of Photo 51," two of her friends recalled memories of Franklin’s school days.

“She was best in science, best at maths, best in everything. She expected that if she undertook to do something, she would be in charge of it.” By the age of 15, over objections from her father, who thought she should go into social work; Franklin decided to become a scientist.

Franklin graduated from Newnham College at Cambridge in 1938 and took a job with the British Coal Utilization Research Association. She was determined to make a contribution to the war effort, and published several papers on the structures and uses of coal and graphite. Her work was used in development of the gas masks that helped keep British soldiers safer. Her work earned her a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry awarded by Cambridge University in 1945.

In 1947, Franklin moved to Paris to take up a job at the Laboratoire Central working with Jacques Mering on perfecting the science of X-ray chromatography. By all accounts, she was very happy in Paris, easily earning the respect of her colleagues. She was known to enjoy doing the meticulous mathematical equations necessary to interpret data about atomic structure that was being revealed by the X-ray techniques. However, in 1951, she reluctantly decided it was necessary to move back to London to advance her scientific career.

Skirting a leftover bomb crater to enter the lab at King’s College in London, Franklin found she was expected to work with antiquated equipment in the basement of the building. She took charge of the lab with her customary efficiency, directing the graduate student, Raymond Gosling, in making needed refinements to the X-ray equipment.

She was annoyed when she discovered that she was expected to interrupt her work and leave the building for lunch every day. Women were not allowed in the College cafeteria. Nevertheless, she and Gosling were making progress in studying DNA when Maurice Wilkins, another senior scientist, returned from his vacation.

Wilkins was upset to learn that the female “assistant,” who he had expected would be working for him, was instead a formidable researcher in her own right. In this tense atmosphere, Franklin continued working to refine her X-ray images, using finer DNA fibers and arranging them differently for her chromatography, but she began to fear she had made a mistake in leaving Paris. Wilkins, also uncomfortable, began to spend more time at nearby Cavendish Laboratory with his friend Francis Crick. Crick and his partner, James Watson, were working on a model-based approach to trying to discover the structure of the DNA molecule.

Around this time, Franklin and Gosling made a startling discovery. There were two forms of DNA shown in the X-ray images, a dry “A” form and a wetter “B” form. Because each X-ray chromatograph had to be exposed for over 100 hours to form an image, and the drier “A” form seemed likelier to produce images in more detail, Franklin set aside the “B” form to study later. She noted that the “B” form images appeared to show a definite helical structure and that there were two clear strands visible in the image she labeled Photo 51 before she filed it away.

Around this time, Franklin attended a conference given at Cavendish to observe an early DNA model being proposed by Watson and Crick. She was quite critical of their work, feeling that they were basing their model solely on conjecture whereas her own work was based on solid evidence.

Her treatment of his friends widened the gap between her and Wilkins, leading to an even more strained relationship at King’s College. Franklin was so unhappy that people in the lab began to talk behind her back calling her the “Dark Lady.” In 1953, she decided to move to Birkbeck College to escape King’s. Somehow, during the move, Wilkins came to be in possession of Franklin’s notes and the files containing Photo 51. Wilkins removed the photo from her records without her knowledge or permission and took it to show his friends at Cavendish. [ Related: 'Lost' Letters Reveal Twists in Discovery of Double Helix ]

“My mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” wrote Watson in his famous book, "The Double Helix." It was the one bit of information that he and Crick needed to complete an accurate model of the structure of DNA. Photo 51 was proof that DNA’s helical structure had two strands attached in the middle by the phosphate bases. They hurried to publish their findings in the journal Nature. The same issue of the journal published much shorter articles by Wilkins and Franklin, but placed them after the longer article by James Watson, seeming to imply that their work merely served to confirm the important discovery made by Watson and Crick rather than being integral to it.

Franklin, meanwhile, had moved on to Birkbeck. Part of the arrangement that allowed her to leave King’s was that she would not pursue any research on DNA, so she turned her talents to studying virus particles. Between 1953 and 1958, she made important discoveries about the tobacco mosaic virus and polio. The work done by Franklin and the other scientists at Birkbeck during this time laid the foundation of modern virology.

Franklin died on April 16, 1958, of ovarian cancer, possibly caused by her extensive exposure to radiation while doing X-ray crystallography work. Because the Nobel Prize can only be shared among three living scientists, Franklin’s work was barely mentioned when it was awarded to Watson, Crick and Wilkins in 1962. By the time "The Double Helix" was written in 1968, Franklin was portrayed almost as a villain in the book. Watson describes her as a “belligerent, emotional woman unable to interpret her own data.”

It is only in the past decade that Franklin’s contribution has been acknowledged and honored. Today there are many new facilities, scholarships and research grants especially those for women, being named in her honor.

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Photo 51 and the discovery of DNA's structure

25 April 2020

• Technology & Science

The discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 was enabled by Dr Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray diffraction work at King’s.

Dr Franklin joined the laboratory of John Randall at King’s in 1950 with a PhD from Cambridge and X-ray diffraction experience in Paris. At King’s, by controlling the water content of the DNA specimens, she showed that the molecule could exist in two forms (A and B). In May 1952 she and PhD student Ray Gosling captured the image of the B form that supported the modelling of DNA - 'photo 51'.

Photo 51 is one of the world’s most important photographs, demonstrating the double-helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid: the molecule containing the genetic instructions for the development of all living organisms. Franklin’s image confirmed James Watson and Francis Crick of the University of Cambridge's hypothesis that DNA had a double helical structure, enabling them to build the first correct model of the DNA molecule in 1953.

A paper by Franklin and Gosling, together with one by Dr Maurice Wilkins and colleagues from King’s, accompanied the announcement of Watson and Crick’s momentous discovery in  Nature  in May 1953.

After leaving King’s in 1953 to work at Birkbeck College, Franklin worked on the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus and of RNA (ribonucleic acid, a nucleic acid present in all living cells). Between 1953 and her death in 1958, aged only 37, she published 17 papers on viruses, and her group laid the foundations for structural virology. 

She is described as a rigorous, careful and intelligent experimentalist, who insisted on robust and carefully collected data. She was a passionate scientist who believed that "science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated."

Watson, Crick and Wilkins were recognised with the Nobel Prize for their discovery of DNA's structure, but the prize is not awarded posthumously, contributing to the exclusion of Franklin's contributions. In recent years, however, Franklin's crucial contributions to the DNA discovery and science more broadly have become more widely recognised.

The Royal Society has an annual award named after her and, in 2015, the story of her discovery was brought to life in London’s West End in the play,  Photograph 51 . Her name is also immortalised by King’s Franklin Wilkins Building at Waterloo Campus, as well as The Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago. Her work provided the basis for modern understanding of genes.

Find out more about the world of Dr Franklin and Photo 51 here .

Photographs courtesy of King’s College London Archives.

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Rosalind Franklin

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Photograph 51, by Rosalind Franklin (1952)

On 6 May 1952, at King´s College London in London, England, Rosalind Franklin photographed her fifty-first X-ray diffraction pattern of deoxyribosenucleic acid, or DNA. Photograph 51, or Photo 51, revealed information about DNA´s three-dimensional structure by displaying the way a beam of X-rays scattered off a pure fiber of DNA. Franklin took Photo 51 after scientists confirmed that DNA contained genes. Maurice Wilkins, Franklin´s colleague showed James Watson and Francis Crick Photo 51 without Franklin´s knowledge. Watson and Crick used that image to develop their structural model of DNA. In 1962, after Franklin´s death, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their findings about DNA. Franklin´s Photo 51 helped scientists learn more about the three-dimensional structure of DNA and enabled scientists to understand DNA´s role in heredity.

X-ray crystallography, the technique Franklin used to produce Photo 51 of DNA, is a method scientists use to determine the three-dimensional structure of a crystal. Crystals are solids with regular, repeating units of atoms. Some biological macromolecules, such as DNA, can form fibers suitable for analysis using X-ray crystallography because their solid forms consist of atoms arranged in a regular pattern. Photo 51 used DNA fibers, DNA crystals first produced in the 1970s. To perform an X-ray crystallography, scientists mount a purified fiber or crystal in an X-ray tube. The X-ray tube generates X-rays that strike the purified material. X-rays are electromagnetic waves that have a shorter wavelength and higher energy than visible light. Because of their short wavelength, X-rays can pass through a crystal and interact with the electrons of the atoms within the crystal. When X-rays interact with electrons in a crystal the X-rays scatter, or diffract, at angles that indicate the arrangement of atoms in the crystal, or its structure. When the X-rays scatter, they strike a film mounted behind the crystal and leave a pattern of dark marks. The pattern of dark marks on the film gives scientists information about the structure of the crystal.

Scientists began collecting X-ray diffraction patterns of DNA in the 1930s before they confirmed that DNA contained genes. William Thomas Astbury, a crystallographer working at the University of Leeds in Leeds, England, gathered the first diffraction patterns of DNA in 1937. However, Astbury´’s diffraction patterns were blurry and difficult to interpret. At the time of Astbury´s experiments, scientists had determined the chemical composition of DNA. However, at that time scientists generally agreed that DNA merely provided structural support for cells and that protein must be genetic material. In 1944 Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty published an experiment that isolated DNA as the material that contained genes.

Maurice Wilkins, a scientist working at King´s College London, collected X-ray diffraction patterns of DNA in 1950. Wilkins and his graduate student, Raymond Gosling, later Franklin´s graduate student, collected X-ray diffraction patterns of DNA purified in a way that produced longer fibers than those accessible to Astbury. When mounting the DNA fibers for viewing, Wilkins and Gosling were able to bundle many of the thin fibers together and pull them tight to provide a larger sample to better diffract X-rays. Furthermore, the two researchers kept the DNA fibers wet with water by keeping them in a humid environment. The resulting X-ray diffraction pattern of DNA was of a higher quality than any patterns collected prior.

Franklin, a specialist in X-ray crystallography, continued previous X-ray crystallography experiments on DNA with Gosling when she joined the King´s College London lab in 1951. Before joining the lab, Franklin conducted X-ray diffraction experiments on carbon compounds at a government lab in Paris, France, and published several papers on X-ray crystallography of coal and coal compounds. Throughout Franklin´s early work at King´s College London, she found that DNA fibers with a higher water content produced a different diffraction pattern than DNA fibers with a lower water content, indicating that wet and dry DNA adopted different three-dimensional conformations. Franklin later defined the drier DNA conformation as the A-Form DNA and the wetter DNA conformation as B-Form DNA. As of 2018, scientists continue to use the A Form and B Form designations for the two conformations of DNA. In addition to identifying the two forms of DNA, Franklin determined that Asbury´s diffraction patterns of DNA came from a mixture of A and B-Forms of DNA.

By improving her methods of collecting DNA X-ray diffraction images, Franklin obtained Photo 51 from an X-ray crystallography experiment she conducted on 6 May 1952. First, she minimized how much the X-rays scattered off the air surrounding the crystal by pumping hydrogen gas around the crystal. Because hydrogen only has one electron, it does not scatter X-rays well. She pumped hydrogen gas through a salt solution to maintain the targeted hydration of the DNA fibers. Franklin tuned the salt concentration of the solution and the humidity surrounding the crystal to keep DNA entirely in the B-Form. After exposing the DNA fibers to X-rays for a total of sixty-two hours, Franklin collected the resulting diffraction pattern and labeled it Number 51 that became Photo 51.

Photo 51 presents a clear diffraction pattern for B-Form DNA. The outermost edge of the diffraction pattern consists of a black diamond shape. The diamond has rounded corners with the darkest corners situated at the top and bottom of the film. The diamond shape of the DNA diffraction pattern is not made of fine, definite lines, but rather thick, fuzzy boarders that vary in darkness such that the boarders fade on the left and right hand sides of the film. Inside the diamond is a cross shape like the letter "X." The X shape is not made of continuous lines. Instead, along each line of the X are four horizontal dashes, called spots that become darker moving closer to the center of the film. There is a hole at the center of the film, with dark spots lining the outside of the center hole.

Researchers could interpret an X-ray diffraction pattern of DNA with knowledge about DNA´s composition, which scientists had at the time Franklin collected photo 51. Years prior to Franklin´s work, scientists determined that DNA consists of a chain of repeating units called nucleotides. Each nucleotide has three key features. Each nucleotide consists of a center sugar ring called deoxyribose. Attached to one end of the deoxyribose ring is a negatively charged phosphate group consisting of phosphorus and oxygen atoms. Attached to the other end of the deoxyribose ring is a molecule called a base consisting of either single or double rings of carbon and nitrogen. There are four types of bases in DNA.

Using the available knowledge about DNA´s composition and mathematical techniques, Franklin learned of some key features regarding the structure of B-Form DNA from Photo 51. The presence of the X shape in the diffraction pattern indicated to Franklin that DNA strands were helical. Each dash of the X shape marks the repetition of atoms, or atomic repeats, in DNA. Therefore, based on the distances between the dashes, Franklin determined the distance between nucleotides, the smallest repeating units in DNA. The angles of the X shape revealed to Franklin the radius of DNA, or half the horizontal distance from one side of the molecule to the other. From the distance between the top and bottom of the outer diamond shape, Franklin found that there are ten nucleotides between each turn of the DNA molecule. Lastly, the lighter nature of the diamond on the top and bottom of the film showed Franklin that the DNA bases face the inside of the helix whereas the phosphate groups face outside. With knowledge of the density, mass per unit volume, of her DNA samples, Franklin also concluded that DNA contained two strands. While Franklin obtained Photo 51 in May 1952, she did not complete her analysis of Photo 51 until early 1953.

In January 1953, Watson visited King´s College London. While visiting, Wilkins showed Watson one of Franklin´s X-ray diffraction images of DNA, which historians claim was one of the clearest image of DNA, Photo 51, without Franklin´s knowledge. From the image, Watson concluded that DNA was helical. During his meeting with Wilkins, Watson also obtained necessary dimensions of DNA derived from Photo 51 that he and Crick later used to develop their proposed structure of DNA. Later, Watson and Crick received an internal King´s College London research report written by Franklin about her DNA diffraction images. From that report, Crick determined that DNA contains two strands, with each strand running in opposite directions.

Watson and Crick, two scientists at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England, relied on Franklin´s Photo 51 to propose a three-dimensional structure of DNA and in April 1953, they suggested a three-dimensional structure of DNA partly based on Photo 51. The model they suggested consisted of two helical strands of repeating nucleotides wound around each other making a double helix. The double helix had ten nucleotides between each turn. The phosphate groups faced outside the double helix and the DNA bases faced horizontally inward of the helix. The two strands held together through interactions between the bases of each strand. The DNA strands ran in opposite directions. As of 2019, Watson and Crick´s proposed DNA structure has remained the verified structure with a few variations of B-Form DNA, the major form of DNA in living cells.

Later, in May 1953, Watson and Crick proposed a replication mechanism for DNA using their DNA structure. Their replication mechanism, later called semi-conservative replication, described how to copy the DNA molecule that contained the genes and to pass the genes from cell to cell and from parent to offspring. Many features of B-Form DNA present in Photo 51 are necessary for semi-conservative replication, such as the DNA bases facing horizontally inward in the double helix. In addition, some aspects of B-Form DNA as indicated in Photo 51 posed challenges for semi-conservative replication. Watson and Crick proposed that the DNA strands needed to unwind and separate in order to replicate. However, because of the helical nature of DNA, as shown in the X-ray diffraction pattern of Photo 51, some scientists argued that the DNA strands would be too difficult to unwind and separate. Some years passed before scientists accepted semi-conservative replication due to the perceived difficulty of unwinding the helical strands.

For their findings related to DNA, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Franklin also contributed to understanding DNA structure, especially through her collection of Photo 51. She also determined many important features about DNA´s structure independently using Photo 51. The award of the Nobel Prize is never posthumously and Franklin died in 1958 before the award of the 1962 Nobel Prize. Some controversy and speculation surrounds the 1962 Nobel Prize concerning Franklin and her contributions to Watson and Crick´s DNA model. Only after the publication of Watson´s, book The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA in 1968 was the roll that Franklin played in the discovery of the structure of DNA realized.

Photo 51, a clear X-ray diffraction pattern of DNA, showed structural features of DNA necessary for scientific understanding of DNA´s three-dimensional structure. By understanding DNA structure, scientists could learn about how DNA functioned as genetic material. The DNA structure revealed in Photo 51 related the essential functions of a gene how its information is preserved and carried from cells to cell and from parent to offspring.

• Asbury, William Thomas, Sylvia Dickinson, and Kenneth Bailey. "The X-ray Interpretation of Denaturation and the Structure of the Seed Globulins." Biochemical Journal 10 (1935): 2351–60. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1266766/
• Avery, Oswald, Theodore, Colin Munro MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty. "Studies on the Chemical Nature of the Substance Inducing Transformation of Pneumococcal Types: Induction of Transformation by Deoxyribonucleic Acid Fraction Isolated from Pneumococcus Type III." Journal of Experimental Medicine 79 (1944): 134–58. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2135445/pdf/137.pdf (Accessed March 8, 2018).
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• Maddox, Brenda. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002.
• Maddox, Brenda. "The Double Helix and the ´Wronged Heroine´." Nature 421 (2003): 407–8.
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Concept 19 The DNA molecule is shaped like a twisted ladder.

• James Watson (1928-)
• Francis Crick (1916-2004)
• Maurice Wilkins (1916-2004)

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958)

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born in London, England. Her family was well-to-do and both sides were very involved in social and public works. Franklin's father wanted to be a scientist, but World War I cut short his education and he became a college teacher instead. Rosalind Franklin was extremely intelligent and she knew by the age of 15 that she wanted to be a scientist. Her father actively discouraged her interest since it was very difficult for women to have such a career. However, with her excellent education from St. Paul's Girls' School ? one of the few institutions at the time that taught physics and chemistry to girls ? Franklin entered Cambridge University in 1938 to study chemistry.

When she graduated, Franklin was awarded a research scholarship to do graduate work. She spent a year in R.G.W. Norrish 's lab without great success. Norrish recognized Franklin's potential but he was not very encouraging or supportive toward his female student. When offered the position as an assistant research officer at the British Coal Utilization Research Association (CURA), Franklin gave up her fellowship and took the job.

CURA was a young organization and there was less formality on the way research had to be done. Franklin worked fairly independently, a situation that suited her. Franklin worked for CURA until 1947 and published a number of papers on the physical structure of coal.

Franklin's next career move took her to Paris. An old friend introduced her to Marcel Mathieu who directed most of the research in France. He was impressed with Franklin's work and offered her a job as a "chercheur" in the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat. Here she learned X-ray diffraction techniques from Jacques Mering.

In 1951, Franklin was offered a 3-year research scholarship at King's College in London. With her knowledge, Franklin was to set up and improve the X-ray crystallography unit at King's College. Maurice Wilkins was already using X-ray crystallography to try to solve the DNA problem at King's College. Franklin arrived while Wilkins was away and on his return, Wilkins assumed that she was hired to be his assistant. It was a bad start to a relationship that never got any better.

Working with a student, Raymond Gosling, Franklin was able to get two sets of high-resolution photos of crystallized DNA fibers. She used two different fibers of DNA, one more highly hydrated than the other. From this she deduced the basic dimensions of DNA strands, and that the phosphates were on the outside of what was probably a helical structure.

She presented her data at a lecture in King's College at which James Watson was in attendance. In his book The Double Helix , Watson admitted to not paying attention at Franklin's talk and not being able to fully describe the lecture and the results to Francis Crick. Watson and Crick were at the Cavendish Laboratory and had been working on solving the DNA structure. Franklin did not know Watson and Crick as well as Wilkins did and never truly collaborated with them. It was Wilkins who showed Watson and Crick the X-ray data Franklin obtained. The data confirmed the 3-D structure that Watson and Crick had theorized for DNA. In 1953, both Wilkins and Franklin published papers on their X-ray data in the same Nature issue with Watson and Crick's paper on the structure of DNA.

Franklin left Cambridge in 1953 and went to the Birkbeck lab to work on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus. She published a number of papers on the subject and she actually did a lot of the work while suffering from cancer. She died from cancer in 1958.

In 1962, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins for solving the structure of DNA. The Nobel committee does not give posthumous prizes.

DNA was first crystallized in the late 70's — remember, the 1953 X-ray data were from DNA fibers. So, the real "proof" for the Watson-Crick model of DNA came in 1982 after the B-form of DNA was crystallized and the X-ray pattern was solved.

If the DNA of one human cell is stretched out, it would be almost 6 feet long and contain over three billion base pairs. How does all this fit into the nucleus of one cell?

Funded by --> The Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation © 2002 - 2011, DNA Learning Center , Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory . All rights reserved.

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Rosalind Franklin is known for her role (largely unacknowledged during her lifetime) in discovering the helical structure of DNA , a discovery credited to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins—received a Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1962. Franklin might have been included in that prize, had she lived. She was born on July 25, 1920, and died on April 16, 1958. she was a biophysicist, physical chemist, and molecular biologist.

Rosalind Franklin was born in London. Her family was well-off; her father worked as a banker with socialist leanings and taught at the Working Men's College.

Her family was active in the public sphere. A paternal great-uncle was the first practicing Jew to serve in the British Cabinet. An aunt was involved with the women's suffrage movement and trade union organizing. Her parents were involved in resettling Jews from Europe.

Rosalind Franklin developed her interest in science at school, and by age 15 she decided to become a chemist. She had to overcome the opposition of her father, who did not want her to attend college or become a scientist; he preferred that she go into social work. She earned her Ph.D. in chemistry in 1945 at Cambridge.

After graduating, Rosalind Franklin stayed and worked for a while at Cambridge and then took a job in the coal industry, applying her knowledge and skill to the structure of coal. She went from that position to Paris, where she worked with Jacques Mering and developed techniques in x-ray crystallography, a leading-edge technique to explore the structure of the atoms in molecules .

Studying DNA

Rosalind Franklin joined the scientists at the Medical Research Unit, King's College when John Randall recruited her to work on the structure of DNA. DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) was originally discovered in 1898 by Johann Miescher, and it was known that it was a key to genetics. But it was not until the middle of the 20th century when scientific methods had developed to where the actual structure of the molecule could be discovered, and Rosalind Franklin's work was key to that methodology.

Rosalind Franklin worked on the DNA molecule from 1951 until 1953. Using x-ray crystallography, she took photographs of the B version of the molecule. A co-worker with whom Franklin did not have a good working relationship, Maurice H.F. Wilkins, showed Franklin's photographs of DNA to James Watson—without Franklin's permission. Watson and his research partner Francis Crick were working independently on the structure of DNA, and Watson realized that these photographs were the scientific evidence they needed to prove that the DNA molecule was a double-stranded helix.

While Watson, in his account of the discovery of the structure of DNA, largely dismissed Franklin's role in the discovery, Crick later admitted that Franklin had been "only two steps away" from the solution herself.

Randall had decided that the lab would not work with DNA, and so by the time her paper was published, she had moved on to Birkbeck College and the study of the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus, and she showed the helix structure of the virus' RNA . She worked at Birkbeck for John Desmond Bernal and with Aaron Klug, whose 1982 Nobel Prize was based in part on his work with Franklin.

In 1956, Franklin discovered she had tumors in her abdomen. She continued to work while undergoing treatment for cancer. She was hospitalized at the end of 1957, returned to work in early 1958, but soon became unable to work. She died in April.

Rosalind Franklin did not marry or have children; she conceived of her choice to go into science as giving up marriage and children.

Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1962, four years after Franklin died. The Nobel Prize rules limit the number of people for an award to three and also limit the award to those who are still alive, so Franklin was not eligible for the Nobel. Nevertheless, many have thought that she deserved explicit mention in the award and that her key role in confirming the structure of DNA was overlooked because of her early death and the attitudes of the scientists of the time toward women scientists .

Watson's book recounting his role in the discovery of DNA displays his dismissive attitude toward "Rosy." Crick's description of Franklin's role was less negative than Watson's, and Wilkins mentioned Franklin when he accepted the Nobel. Anne Sayre wrote a biography of Rosalind Franklin, responding to the lack of credit given to her and the descriptions of Franklin by Watson and others. The wife of another scientist at the laboratory and a friend of Franklin, Sayre describes the clash of personalities and the sexism that Franklin faced in her work. Aaron Klug used Franklin's notebooks to show how close she had come to independently discovering the structure of DNA.

In 2004, the Finch University of Health Sciences/The Chicago Medical School changed its name to the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science to honor Franklin's role in science and medicine.

Career Highlights

• Fellowship, Cambridge, 1941-42: gas-phase chromatography, working with Ronald Norrish (Norrish won a 1967 Nobel in chemistry)
• British Coal Utilisation Research Association, 1942-46: studied physical structure of coal and graphite
• Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat, Paris, 1947-1950: worked with x-ray crystallography, working with Jacques Mering
• Medical Research Unit, King's College, London; Turner-Newall fellowship, 1950-1953: worked on the structure of DNA
• Birkbeck College, 1953-1958; studied tobacco mosaic virus and RNA
• St. Paul's Girls' School, London: one of the few schools for girls that included scientific study
• Newnham College, Cambridge, 1938-1941, graduated 1941 in chemistry
• Cambridge, Ph.D. in chemistry, 1945
• Father: Ellis Franklin
• Mother: Muriel Waley Franklin
• Rosalind Franklin was one of four children, the only daughter

Religious Heritage: Jewish, later became an agnostic

Also known as:  Rosalind Elsie Franklin, Rosalind E. Franklin

Key Writings by or About Rosalind Franklin

• Rosalind Franklin and Raymond G. Gosling [research student working with Franklin]. Article in Nature published April 25, 1953, with Franklin's photograph of the B form of DNA. In the same issue as Watson and Crick's article announcing the double-helix structure of DNA.
• J. D. Bernal. "Dr. Rosalind E. Franklin." Nature 182, 1958.
• James D. Watson. The Double Helix. 1968.
• Aaron Klug, "Rosalind Franklin and the discovery of the structure of DNA." Nature 219, 1968.
• Robert Olby. The Path to the Double Helix. 1974.
• Anne Sayre. Rosalind Franklin and DNA. 1975.
• Brenda Maddox. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA. 2002.
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Untangling Rosalind Franklin’s Role in DNA Discovery, 70 Years On

Historians have long debated the role that Dr. Franklin played in identifying the double helix. A new opinion essay argues that she was an “equal contributor.”

By Emily Anthes

On April 25, 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published a landmark paper in Nature, proposing the double helix as the long elusive structure of DNA, a discovery that a decade later earned the men the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

In the final paragraph of the paper, they acknowledged that they had been “stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas” of two scientists at King’s College London, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin.

In the 70 years since, a less flattering story has emerged, thanks in large part to Dr. Watson’s own best-selling book, “The Double Helix.” In the book, he not only wrote disparagingly of Dr. Franklin, whom he called Rosy, but also said that he and Dr. Crick had used her data without her knowledge.

“Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data,” Dr. Watson wrote. “For that matter, no one at King’s realized they were in our hands.”

This account became a parable of poor scientific behavior, leading to a backlash against Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick and turning Dr. Franklin into a feminist icon. It also set off a long-running debate among historians: Precisely what role did Dr. Franklin play in the discovery of the double helix, and to what extent was she wronged?

In a new opinion essay , published in Nature on Tuesday, two scholars argue that what transpired “was less malicious than is widely assumed.” The scholars, Matthew Cobb, a zoologist and historian at the University of Manchester who is writing a biography of Dr. Crick, and Nathaniel Comfort, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins University who is writing a biography of Dr. Watson, draw upon two previously overlooked documents in Dr. Franklin’s archive.

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October 1, 2023

Rosalind Franklin Deserves a Posthumous Nobel Prize for Co-discovering DNA Structure

Awarding Rosalind Franklin a Nobel Prize posthumously for her role in DNA discovery is the honorable—and scientific—thing to do

By Naomi Oreskes

Rosalind Franklin was excluded from the Nobel Prize that was awarded for the discovery of DNA's structure.

Photo 12/Getty Images

The two most famous prizes in the world are the Academy Award for work in film and the Nobel Prize for work in science and medicine. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences grants posthumous awards for people who won in their category but died before they could attend the ceremony and, occasionally, for special recognition, as when Audrey Hepburn was awarded the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1993. It's time the Nobel Assembly did the same thing and awarded a posthumous Nobel Prize to British chemist and crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, whose research laid the foundation for the modern understanding of DNA.

Franklin was passed over for the prize in physiology or medicine when it was awarded in 1962 to biologists James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for their discovery of the molecular structure of DNA. Previously no one could figure out how a simple molecule like DNA could carry large amounts of information. The double-helix structure solved the problem: DNA encodes information in the sequences of base pairs that sit inside the helix, and it replicates this information when the helical strands separate and re-create the matching strand.

The 1962 prize remains controversial, not just because three men won it while their female colleague was left out but also because the men relied on crucial information that they took from Franklin without her knowledge or consent: a set of x-ray diffraction images of DNA's crystal structure. Franklin provided essential quantitative data on the structure in a report she shared with a colleague, who shared it with Watson and Crick. Later analysis of her laboratory notebooks showed not only that she had deduced the double-helix structure but also that she recognized that a structure based on complementary strands could explain how the molecule carried large amounts of genetic information because “an infinite variety of nucleotide sequences would be possible.”

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Franklin published a paper on her research (with her graduate student, Raymond Gosling) in the same 1953 issue of Nature where Watson and Crick announced the conclusions for which they would be awarded the Nobel. But Franklin and Gosling's paper, boringly entitled “Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate,” lacked the impact of Watson and Crick's declaration that they had discovered DNA's structure . In 1958 Franklin died of ovarian cancer, probably caused by her exposure to x-rays at a time when lab precautions were not what they are today.

Nobel rules state that prizes can be awarded only to living scientists, but many people believe that even had Franklin lived, the Nobel Assembly would have passed her over, just as it had all but three women before her: physicist Marie Curie for her role in explaining radioactivity and for isolating radium; radiochemist Irène Joliot-Curie for discovering induced radioactivity; and biochemist Gerty Cori , who showed how cells convert sugar into energy. Moreover, the award citation for the DNA work barely mentioned Franklin's role. (Wilkins was not an author on the key 1953 DNA paper, either, yet he was included in the Nobel Prize.)

Scholars have argued that Franklin has been misrepresented. In a commentary published in Nature earlier this year, zoologist Matthew Cobb and historian of science Nathaniel Comfort explain that Watson's best-selling 1968 book The Double Helix implied that Franklin didn't comprehend the implications of her own data and in so doing minimized her role in the discovery. In fact, Cobb and Comfort demonstrate, “Franklin did not fail to grasp the structure of DNA. She was an equal contributor to solving it.”

The Nobel Assembly should right this wrong by awarding a posthumous Nobel to Franklin for her central role in the discovery of the double-helix structure. While they are at it, they ought to honor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars only to see the 1974 physics Nobel awarded to her thesis adviser —despite the fact that he had initially disbelieved her observations. Ditto for Chien-Shiung Wu , who proved that the “law of parity conservation ”—that subatomic objects and their mirror images must behave the same way—was no law at all. ( Eugene Wigner shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics in part for formulating that “law,” even though two male colleagues of Wu had won the prize in 1957 for disproving it !) And then there is Lise Meitner , the co-discoverer, with Otto Hahn, of nuclear fission. It was Meitner , along with her nephew, Otto Frisch, who proposed the term “fission” to describe what they had found, but Hahn won the prize .

It is the essence of science to recognize errors and correct them. It's time for the Nobel Assembly to embody this ideal and do the same.

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How Rosalind Franklin Discovered the Helical Structure of DNA: Experiments in Diffraction

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Gregory Braun , Dennis Tierney , Heidrun Schmitzer; How Rosalind Franklin Discovered the Helical Structure of DNA: Experiments in Diffraction. Phys. Teach. 1 March 2011; 49 (3): 140–143. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.3555496

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Rosalind Franklin, a chemical physicist (1920–1958), used x‐ray diffraction to determine the structure of DNA. What exactly could she read out from her x‐ray pattern, shown in Fig. 1? 1 In lecture notes dated November 1951, R. Franklin wrote the following: “The results suggest a helical structure (which must be very closely packed) containing 2, 3 or 4 co‐axial nucleic acid chains per helical unit, and having the phosphate groups near the outside.” 2 This was 16 months before J. D. Watson and F. Crick published their description of DNA, which was based on R. Franklin's x‐ray photos. How they gained access to her x‐ray photos is a fascinating tale of clashing personalities and male chauvinism. 2,3

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• NATURE PODCAST
• 26 April 2023

How Rosalind Franklin’s story was rewritten

• Benjamin Thompson &

Shamini Bundell

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Listen to the latest science news, with Benjamin Thompson and Shamini Bundell.

In this episode:

00:57 Franklin’s real role

When it comes to the structure of DNA, everyone thinks they know Rosalind Franklin’s role in its discovery. The story goes that her crucial data was taken by James Watson without her knowledge, helping him and Francis Crick solve the structure. However, new evidence has revealed that this wasn’t really the case. Rosalind Franklin was not a ‘wronged heroine’, she was an equal contributor to the discovery.

Comment: What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure

13:41 Research Highlights

How the growth of tiny iodine-engined satellites could damage the ozone layer, and how a pill-like detector that could measure radiotherapy dosages.

Research Highlight: How CubeSats could harm the ozone layer

Research Highlight: An easy-to-swallow pill monitors X-ray dosage

16:06 Why multisensory experiences can make stronger memories

It’s recognized that multisensory experiences can create strong memories and that later-on, a single sensory experience can trigger memories of the whole event, like a specific smell conjuring a visual memory. But the neural mechanisms behind this are not well understood. Now, a team has shown that rich sensory experiences can create direct neural circuit between the memory regions involved with different senses. This circuit increases memory strength in the flies, and helps explain how sense and memories are interlinked.

Research article: Okray et al.

23:44 Briefing Chat

We discuss some highlights from the Nature Briefing . This time, how video calls could help parrots feel less isolated, and a new method for recycling wind turbine blades.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01443-w

Welcome back to the Nature Podcast , this week: how Rosalind Franklin's story got rewritten...

Benjamin Thompson

...and the link between multisensory experiences and memory. I'm Benjamin Thompson.

And I'm Shamini Bundell.

<Music>

First up on the 70th anniversary of the publication of the structure of DNA, reporter Nick Petrić Howe has been reexamining Rosalind Franklin's contributions.

Nick Petrić Howe

Cambridge, England 1953.

In the Eagle, a pub and common haunt of Cavendish lab staff, two men burst through the door and breathlessly announce "we've, we've discovered the secret of life." This story is one you're likely familiar with. It's a famous anecdote from James Watson about how he and Francis Crick announced that they'd discovered the structure of DNA, and it most likely didn't happen. In a similar vein, you're probably also familiar with the story of how it wasn't actually just Watson and Crick behind this breathtaking discovery. Maurice Wilkins, who later shared the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick, and Rosalind Franklin, were key to the breakthrough.

In fact, almost as famous as the story of the Eagle is the one that paints Franklin as a victim whose data and the famous photograph 51, of the DNA helix, were taken by Watson without her permission, helping him and Crick solve the structure whilst her role was diminished. But writing in Nature this week two biographers of Watson and Crick are revealing how this isn't really true either.

Nathaniel Comfort

It does a disservice to Franklin to portray her as the brilliant crystallographer who was cheated out of the structure. No, she was an equal contributor.

This is Nathaniel Comfort, a historian of medicine from Johns Hopkins, who's writing a biography of Watson. This perspective is in contrast with a widely held view that Franklin had missed crucial data, in particular a very clear image of DNA, known as photograph 51, which then Watson stole to get the crucial insights. But according to Matthew Cobb, zoologist and biographer of Crick, from the University of Manchester, this is just Watson semi-fictionalised account.

Matthew Cobb

According to him, he sees photograph 51, he immediately realises DNA must be some kind of helix. And he and Crick then go on in the next few weeks to discover the structure. Now the implication of that is that this photograph, which was taken by Franklin and her PhD student Raymond Gosling the year before, the implication of this is that Franklin — who was a very smart person — sat on this bit of data and didn't get it. Whereas Watson, who knew very little about X-ray crystallography, he took one glance at it. And bingo, he instantly knew what it meant. And this just strikes any historian who studies this as being rather unlikely.

And this rather unlikely account may have become even less likely, with Matthew and Nathaniel’s recent discovery of documents, which put Franklin’s contributions and the relationship between her, Watson, Crick and Wilkins, in a different light. Let’s go back to 1951.

At this time the structure of DNA was unclear. People knew that it had a phosphate backbone with A, T, C and G bases, but not a lot else. So, in 1951 Franklin joined John Randall and Maurice Wilkins at Kings College London. There they were using X-ray diffraction, a method to determine the position of atoms in a structure, to better understand DNA. She was looking at a very pure sample of DNA, which came in two forms. A crystalline A-form, and a less crystal-like B-form.

She was able to change the A- into the B-form under the microscope and in the X ray beam, simply by raising the relative humidity of the sample chamber. So that differentiates these two forms.

This resolved a problem that had confused researchers for a while; previously experiments had used a mixture of A- and B-forms which were impossible to fully interpret. But this wasn’t her only insight at this point.

When Watson first got into the DNA problem, in November of 1951, he attends a seminar by Franklin. And in that seminar, she presented both A- and B-DNA and said they are big, both of them were a big helix, with the phosphate backbones on the outside with the bases pointing in, right, and gave some basic parameters of it that are essentially the ones that that they used to solve the structure. So that was already known.

So, the famous photograph 51 of the B-form of DNA is unlikely to have given Watson a sudden insight into DNA being a helix, as aside from Watson not really knowing much about X-ray crystallography, nobody really doubted DNA was a helix at this time. Matthew and Nathaniel also discovered a programme from the Royal Society with a talk listed about the structure of DNA, and it was to be given by Crick, Watson, Wilkins and Franklin. That wasn’t all though, they also came upon an unpublished news article written for TIME magazine.

And this is the article that was supposed to go with the very famous pictures, which we've all seen now, of Watson and Crick in front of the model. So, we knew these photos had been taken for TIME Magazine, but it was never any trace of this article. And then we find this in the Churchill college archives at Cambridge. And this article, which is a bit poor, from a scientific point of view, which is probably why didn't get published, presents the discovery precisely as a collaborative work between the King's people — Wilkins, and Franklin — on the one hand, and with Watson and Crick in Cambridge, on the other. And presents it in a much more egalitarian approach. And this article was written in conjunction with Franklin.

This account also tallies with the three original papers on the structure of DNA that were published in Nature in 1953. One was much theoretical and came from Watson and Crick, whilst the other two came from Franklin and Wilkins, and their teams, and were much more data heavy. Now at the time, Watson and Crick did say that the structure they had come up with “rests mainly though not entirely on published experimental data and stereochemical arguments”, however, this was shortly followed up by another paper where they acknowledged that without Franklin’s data “the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible”.

But if the contemporary narrative was this one of collaboration, why is that the story so many of us are familiar with is so different from this? What happened?

Watson happened. And the Double Helix happened, that account that you and everybody else knows, is derived from Watson's account in his 1968 book, the Double Helix. It is a very strange book. It's treated as, as a historical account. But it's only partly historical. He makes stuff up, he takes literary licence in the book. So he's taking a good story and he's embellishing it, and turning it into this heroic discovery narrative, right, with all sorts of, you know, clandestine behaviour and, and theft and jokes and all kinds of things, right? And so to make it a good story. And the book has been read as straight history, and instead of this complicated mix of history, and fiction, and science writing, it's sort of all rolled into one.

The account given in the Double Helix was also challenged by Wilkins and Crick, who even tried to stop its publication, in part because of how the book’s story dealt with Rosalind’s contribution. They were ultimately unsuccessful. Rosalind was unable to share her side of the story at that time, because she had died a decade before the book was published, from ovarian cancer at the age of 37. For DNA, her contributions were vital. She differentiated the A- and B-forms of DNA; she determined that the DNA molecule was enormous; and figured out that there was a symmetry in the DNA. Much of this was actually communicated to Watson and Crick through a report from her and Wilkins. However, she died some years before DNA was fully recognised for the important molecule we now know it as, and before Wilkins, Crick and Watson won the Nobel Prize for its structure. We can only speculate about how the story of the discovery of DNA’s structure might have been told had Rosalind lived longer or had that TIME article detailing her contribution actually been published. Instead, Rosalind Franklin has become a figurehead for marginalised and overlooked scientists. But stories can distort how we see the real people behind them. Because as much as she has become a symbol, Rosalind was also a real person.

Hannah Franklin

She was a super sort of dedicated, driven, passionate woman.

This is Hannah Franklin, a PhD student at the Francis Crick Institute, and University College London. And Rosalind's great-niece. I should also say here that I have a personal connection to Hannah. She works with my wife. And so, when I started looking into this story, I was interested to speak to her and ask about what she made of the way her great-aunt is often talked about.

She didn't suffer fools gladly. And I think people have that perception of her. And sometimes it's been misinterpreted as her being remembered as this quite cold character. And all she cared about was the science. But, you know, from what I've heard from family members, she was an amazing, warm woman.

I've actually known her for a few years now, and she makes no claim to be an expert on her great-aunt. But she has grown up hearing stories about her from the family members that knew her. From Hannah's perspective, as important as we now think of DNA, for Rosalind, the double helix wasn't even the most important part of her life's work.

She made significant contributions in the space of viruses and coal and carbon. And that actually, her time working on DNA were perhaps some of the unhappiest of her life. You know, at Kings, she wasn't allowed into the senior common room alongside her male counterparts. She wasn't allowed purely for being a woman. So when you think about in pubs, and in common rooms, the sort of informal scientific conversations that take place, she wasn't a part of that.

In fact, Rosalind's gravestone mentions her work and viruses, but nothing about DNA. It was a small part of a greater life's work. To put it simply, Rosalind was a more complex and full person than merely a victim of the discovery of DNA structure.

In the end, painting Rosalind Franklin as a wronged heroine does her an injustice. She was an equal partner in the discovery of the structure of DNA. Stories about eureka moments and individual genius can be seductive, but they’re rarely the truth — especially in the collaborative fields of science. So how should we remember Rosalind Franklin?

So, I think to be remembered for being a significant contributor in very impactful science, and not just because of the obstacles that she faced, and that she would have wanted to be remembered for the science and for the human that she was not just put on this pedestal of being some hero because of the obstacles that she faced. So, I think that's a really important message that I think and I've interpreted from the family is what they want her legacy to be.

That was Hannah Franklin from UCL and the Francis Crick Institute here in the UK. You also heard from Matthew Cobb from the University of Manchester in the UK, and Nathaniel Comfort from Johns Hopkins University in the US. To read Matthew and Nathaniel's comment article, look out for a link in the show notes.

Coming up, how multisensory experiences create stronger memories in fruit flies. Right now, it's time for the research highlights read by Dan Fox.

Currently, there are almost 4000 miniature satellites circling the Earth, with most of them maintaining their orbits by using electricity to accelerate beams of xenon gas. But xenon is rare and expensive, and iodine is seen as a promising replacement. To investigate the possible risk of this switch researchers model the potential damage that iodine, released from propulsion systems, could cause to the ozone layer. They found minimal effects for a scenario where 40,000 new satellites were launched each year, injecting an estimated eight tons of iodine into the atmosphere. But scaling those numbers up by a factor of 100 could result in 2–7% depletion of stratospheric ozone in the Antarctic region. The analysis could help governments to ensure that the rapidly growing industry does not affect the ozone layer. To read that research in full propel yourself over to Geophysical Research Letters .

A team have developed a tiny pill-like device that can measure how much X ray radiation is being delivered to gastrointestinal tumors during radiotherapy. Measuring 18 millimeters by seven millimeters, roughly the size of an over the counter painkiller, the battery powered sensor is designed to be swallowed, and once in the body, it can monitor the amount of radiation reaching cancerous tissues in real-time. The device can also detect changes in pH and temperature, important measures for diagnosing and monitoring tumors. Inside it contains nano-scintillators, tiny particles that become luminescent after absorbing radiation. That glow is then read by a sensor and the measurements wirelessly transmitted to a mobile phone app. So far, the pill has only been tested in rabbits and to be useful in a clinical setting for humans, imaging methods will be needed to ensure that the pill is in the right location. And the authors say that refinements are still needed to anchor it in place. You can find that paper in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

For our second story, I've decamped to a stairwell here at Nature Towers to take a big sniff of the air. And this actually does have something to do with a research paper about memory that's coming out in Nature this week. You see, earlier this year, I was walking up these very stairs, and I got a faint whiff of a very specific smell, the lemon scented cleaning product they use on the floors here. Not unusual, I hear you cry. But you know what that smell was exactly the same as the one I used to smell 25 years ago, as it was used to clean the student accommodation I lived in when I started at university. As soon as I could smell it, bam, I was back in my room all that time ago, I could see it perfectly in my mind. And I could hear my flatmates yelling at each other. While they played yet another round of Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64. It was like I was back there. And you know what? It turns out that memories and multisensory experiences are tightly linked. Most organisms live in a multisensory world. And research has shown that experiences that involve different senses can improve memory strength, compared to those that involve a single sense. Zenep Okray, from the University of Oxford, will explain, while I head back to my desk.

Zenep Okray

We've seen this in scientific studies. For example, in one of these studies with humans, that audio-visual cues helps memory performance more than just having a visual cue or an auditory cue. And this holds true also for insects and rodents and controlled experiments.

Studies have suggested that when you're making memories about something using multiple senses, the different parts of the brain involved with those senses, will all be working. It seems that interactions happen between these areas, which increases the strength of a memory. And later on if one sensory part of that memory gets activated, say the smell part, other sensory memories, say visual ones, can be activated too. Like how the smell of the cleaning products fired up the visual memories of my student flats, for example. Actually working out exactly how this happens has been tough, though. But this week, Zenep and her colleagues have a paper in Nature that details a mechanism for how this might work, in the brains of fruit flies. To find it, they had to give these fruit flies a multisensory experience. Now these animals are good at discerning between odors and colors, so the team set up experiments where fruit flies learn to associate a reward, sugar, with a specific smell a specific colour, or a combination of the two. Later the flies were tested to see if they preferentially chose those over a non-reward related colour, odour or combo, essentially did they remember what was associated with the reward.

And what we found is that the flies learn better if they had both the colors and odours to make that association. So if they learned with only one sense, then their memory was sort of standard. If they learned with two senses, their memory was improved. And what was also interesting is that even when there was only one cue, so either color or odour, the flies performed better if they had initially learned with two cues so both colour and odour to start with.

So learning with two senses, boosted the flies ability to remember, even if they were later presented with an experience that only triggered one. This sort of thing has been seen before. But because the fruit fly brain and all the cells and connections it contains have been so well mapped out, Zenep and her colleagues could zoom in to see exactly what was going on. And they looked in a specific area of the fruit fly brain known as the mushroom body, known to be involved in remembering experiences.

The mushroom body is what we consider the centre for learning and memory in flies. Where the sensory information is integrated with the meaning of the experience. So basically with, for example, is it a pleasant experience or a bad experience? And then it skews the behaviour directing neurons afterwards.

So, the team looked at the activity of neurons within the mushroom body to see what was happening in fruit flies, which had had a multisensory learning experience.

During learning the neurons that encoded the different sensory information they got connected. So there are the cells that are odour selected, normally, they don't respond to colours. And what happens if the animal learns with odours and colours is that these older selective cells now become responsive to colours. So with one colour, you can activate both the odours cells and the visual cells.

And the reverse was true as well, with the colour-related cells being activated by those involved with odour. But how? Were these two groups of cells directly talking with each other? Well, the team think that's unlikely, as direct connections between the two are sparse. Instead, it looked like a third player was involved that wired the two together.

We call it an interneuron. So it's a big, big, big, hefty neuron that sort of covers almost like a net over all of the sensory encoding cells.

This interneuron is vital to complete this circuit between the two groups. And it produces the neurotransmitter serotonin, which looks to have an important role in this crosstalk between the two, and allows one sensory memory to recall those associated with another.

Basically, what happens is that the odour information comes in, it's activating the other responsive cells, and then this activates the interneuron. And that excitation carries over to the visual stream.

But this begs the question, when the fruit fly smell something familiar, is it also picturing the entire scene in its mind's eye? Much like I can picture my student room when I smell the right cleaning product?

What would a mental representation look like in a fly? This is an interesting question… To anthropomorphize is difficult. But indeed, I think what's happening is that maybe it's not seeing it, but there's definitely a neural representation of all the components. What this means for the fly, I don't really know. But we also do know that it uses it to guide its behaviour. So perhaps it sort of is kind of aware that there's more to the story.

And there's likely to be more to the story of this brain circuit too. The team are still trying to figure out exactly how it works, and exactly how the system leads to the creation of stronger memories. There's the big question as well, of course, of whether this work is relevant to other animals. But Zenep says that finding this circuit, which explains how a single stimulus input can lead to multiple memory outputs, is a start. And it could help unravel more about how multisensory experiences can influence learning, memory generation, and ultimately, maybe why a lemon scent can take me back to the past.

We do believe that our work might reveal general principles about the neural circuits that underlie this behaviour. We don't of course, know that this is the case in higher mammals. But I think some of the fundamentals of what we discovered might hold true, it's important for us to understand the neural circuit mechanisms of memory and different forms of memory, because changes in our memory function are quite relevant to society, as we age as cognition changes during ageing, and also for neurodegenerative diseases as well.

That was Zenep Okray from the University of Oxford here in the UK. To read her paper, head over to the show notes for a link.

Finally, on the show, it's time for the Briefing Chat, where we discuss a few of the articles that have been highlighted in the Nature Briefing. So Ben, what are we chatting about this week?

Today? I've got a story that I read about in The Guardian, and it's based on some research by a team in the US and the UK. Now, I don't know about you, but certainly for a lot of people, video calls — you know, FaceTime, Zoom, and what have you — really came into their own in the last few years. And I think these services helped folk keep in contact with their family and friends during lockdown and help with things like isolation and loneliness and what have you. And while this may have been the case for humans, researchers want to know if the same thing was true for parrots.

I actually know nothing about the story this week, but I wasn't expecting parrots on Zoom calls. Tell me more.

So parrots often live in flocks, which is something they don't usually get a chance to do when they're kept as pets or in a small group, for example. And this can result in psychological issues. So the team behind this work wanted to see if they could improve things for the birds by letting them chat to other birds via a tablet and video calls.

Ah that's as interesting because I suppose you don't often think about parrots as social animals. But of course, we do know that social animals... it's really important for them to have those connections and relationships and things but is a Zoom call gonna do the trick?

Well, this is what the researchers wanted to find out. And so, they recruited a small group of parrots from different species and their owners from an online educational site for parrots, okay. And what happened in this study was, firstly, they taught the parents to ring a bell, and then touch an image of another parrot from a group of parrots on the screen that they wanted to talk to you, right? But their owners obviously helped them do this, right? So, this was the assistance stage. And once they'd figured that out, the birds were able to make calls freely to their parrot pals. And over the course of the experiment then, 147 deliberate calls were made. And the owners were taking notes on how the parrots were behaving and what they were up to.

I think my main question here is that when humans video call each other — you know, we're recording this podcast via video call right now, in fact — most of our communication is speech, is talking. Now, parrots I suppose, in one way are quite famous for being able to talk, but in what kind of ways were they interacting with each other over a video call?

Well, talking was certainly one aspect of it, they were also doing, you know, other parrot stuff; the sort of behavior that's seen during real life interactions, okay. So preening and that sort of thing. And some parrots repeatedly chose to call the same individual. So it seemed like there were some bonds being formed, then, of course, we need to be very careful not to overlay kind of the human condition on these birds. But it does seem like they were interacting and showing the sorts of behaviours that would be seen in other environments.

But is there a way to distinguish, I suppose what kind of thing the birds were reacting to, you know, is it a sort of social interaction and connection? Or is it more the novelty of it? Or, you know, just sort of entertainment to alleviate boredom? Can you tell?

Well, good questions there, certainly. And I will say this is quite a small study. And the researchers do make the point in the paper, like with the same thing be seen if the parents watching a video of another parrot and interacting that way, but I think they make the point that in this case, they're not trying to trick the animals — they talk about the ethics of that — they're not looking at the sort of the cognitive responses of these birds, they're actually trying to enrich their experience—

—but they make the point as well, they need to be careful that the parrot owners don't suddenly go and do this because this was quite controlled and the parrot owners were shepherded in ways to do this in a way that wouldn't upset the birds, for example. But it could be an interesting way to enrich these birds lives in the future. The authors say that there's potentially 20 million parrots in homes in the US that maybe don't get a lot of parrots. And I learned that it's quite difficult sometimes for pet owners to meet up because there can be diseases that can be passed between the birds, so there can be some issues there. But video calling might be a good way for parrots to get together.

Oh, well, that was interesting and unexpected. Thank you very much, Ben, I'll tell you about my story for this week, which is a Nature paper. And I am once again, going to tell you about something that I'm also making a video about. And it's quite cool, it's about how to recycle wind turbine blades.

Which is not something that I necessarily thought about as needing recycling, because I talked about recycling plastics last week on the show, and I guess you can imagine small scale plastic things — a plastic bag, or a plastic bottle, or whatever — but wind turbines are huge. And I guess I kind of naively thought that once they were there, they were kind of there forever just doing their thing.

They do last, so they last I think like 20/30 years before you kind of have to replace them. So they've got a decent lifespan. But we're kind of coming to a place now where 20/30 years ago, people were putting up a lot of wind turbines. And now we're having to work out what to do with all of those things. And ultimately, this is a story about recycling plastic. But it's about how to recycle this specific type of material that the outer shell of wind turbine blades are made of. It's a super strong material: it's a composite of fibers like fiberglass, or carbon fibers with epoxy, so like resins that you make by mixing two materials together. And then the fibers are all embedded in them. So super strong plastic. But unfortunately, this particular material, super hard to recycle.

And so enter the new work then, this new Nature paper this week. Have they come about it in a different way then? What's their solution?

It seems to be quite a new process that they've come up with, to find a way to recycle this epoxy material at all. No one's really been able to do that before in a way that gets some useful stuff back out of it. And they had a particular substance in mind, called Bisphenol A, it's sort of particularly valuable and it's one of the things that you need to make these epoxy resins basically. So they experiment to develop this process. Now this is very small scale at this point. In my video, you can see they're doing this like in a test tube. And what they do is they get their little piece of wind turbine, put it in a completely oxygen-free environment. They add some solvent, they add a catalyst, heat it 260 degrees and leave it there for quite a long time, several days, and they've got this catalyst which basically targets a particular type of bond, a really specific CO bond in this epoxy — one of the researchers described it as like a Pac Man coming along and like chomping down — so it breaks this bond. This is all sort of from the outside of the material, you know, it can only access the outside so it kind of chomp chomp chomps and then sort of exposes more of the inside. And eventually, chomps away at it all. And it all just sort of like dissolved into this solution. And then they can separate out multiple different materials from this mixture in their little test tube.

I mean, that sounds neat, but I guess there's a gap between a tiny test tube in a lab and these enormous great wind turbines, which I imagine the, you know, the sort of size of the Statue of Liberty or something like that.

Yeah. So this is a proof of concept right? Now they're saying, hey, look, it is possible to find a chemical solution, so to speak, for getting something useful recycling this composite material. And this is a material they make wind turbine blades out of but also electric cars, aeroplane wings, fancy boats, things like that. So these epoxies are relatively widely used. The main issue, when I asked about scaling it up, they said the catalyst they used ruthenium is particularly expensive. So, you know, they've published this proof of concept, but I think they're looking at ways to make that ruthenium, more active, more stable. So basically, is there a way that they can do the same thing with a lot less of this expensive catalyst needing to be used up?

And what sort of difference do you think this might make then? How many wind turbine blades a year need to be recycled ultimately?

Well, it's gonna be a huge number. Wind-use is growing in general. And clean energy reduces the need for fossil fuels, you know, helping slow down climate change, potentially. But this waste issue has been a little bit of a sort of thorn in its side of this whole sector. So lots of people have been really keen on trying to solve this problem. And you know, there are other solutions that have been worked on as we speak, future wind turbines could be potentially made of different materials, perhaps more easily recyclable. However, to answer your question, there's a lot. So there's an estimate that was in the paper, which is that by 2050, the world will have 43 million tonnes of decommissioned wind turbine blades to deal with. Now we're going to put that in context, right. So if you compare it to other energy production methods, coal fired power plants produce far more waste products every year. And that's even before you consider the waste involved in decommissioning them. And obviously, that's producing carbon dioxide as well. But the wind sector would like to be obviously as green as possible. And there you know, there are a lot of people who are very keen to stop wind turbine blades going into landfill. So potentially, this new chemical method could be one way to do that.

And if listeners want to know more about this, and maybe watch it in more of a visual medium, where could they go to find that out?

That's funny, you should ask because yes, I have made a video about that. It's up right now on our YouTube channel. So we'll stick a link to that in the show notes. And yes, you can see for yourself the little pieces of wind turbine blades dissolving away.

Fantastic. Well, listen, let's leave it there then for this week's Briefing Chat. And listeners, if you want more about these stories, and where you can sign up for The Nature Briefing to get even more like them delivered directly to your inbox, look out for links in the show notes.

And as always, you can keep in touch with us on Twitter, we're @naturepodcast, or you can send us an email to [email protected]. I'm Shamini Bundell.

And I'm Benjamin Thompson. Thanks for listening.

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