Rosalind Franklin: The Truth Behind DNA Discovery Who Was Rosalind Franklin? Rosalind Franklin, British scientist best known for her contributions to the discovery of the molecular structure 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. She graduated from Newnham College, one of two women’s colleges at Cambridge University.
Career Towards Discovering DNA When Rosalind started work in John T. Randall’s Biophysics Unit at King’s College London, she was originally planned to build up a crystallography section and work on analyzing proteins, however, Franklin was asked to investigate DNA instead. Maurice Wilkins, the lab assistant chief, expected that he and Rosalind Franklin would work together, but it was said that only she would do the DNA work. Her subsequent relations with Wilkins suffered from this misunderstanding and they never worked with each other. Rosalind took increasingly clear x-ray diffraction photos of DNA, and quickly discovered that there were two forms--wet and dry-which produced very different pictures. The wet form she realized was probably helical in structure, with the phosphates on the outside of the ribose chains. It took 2 years to concluded that both forms had two helices.
Layla Abounassif Fifth Year Pharmacy student Lebanese International University
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