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Rosalind Franklin: The Truth Behind DNA Discovery
from Feminews
by lpsa_lebanon
Rosalind Franklin: The Truth Behind DNA Discovery
Who Was Rosalind Franklin?
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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
Meanwhile, at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, Francis Crick (Biophysicist) and James Watson (Molecular Biologist) were working on a theoretical model of DNA. Though not in close communication with Rosalind Franklin, in January 1953 they extracted crucial insights about DNA’s structure from one of her x-ray diffraction photos shown to them by Wilkins, and from a summary of her unpublished research submitted to the Medical Research Council. Watson and Crick never told Franklin that they had seen her materials, and they did not directly acknowledge their debt to her work when they published their classic announcement in Nature that April. Crick later admitted that Franklin was two steps away from realizing the correct structure in the spring of 1953.
Achievements, Injustice, and Death
Throughout her 16-year career, Franklin published steadily: 19 articles on coals and carbons, 5 on DNA, and 21 on viruses. Franklin’s scientific achievements, both in coal chemistry and virus structure research were considerable. In the fall of 1956 Franklin was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. For the next 18 months she underwent surgeries and other treatments; she had several periods of remission, during which she continued working in her lab and seeking funding for her research team. She died in London on April 16, 1958. Her peers in those fields acknowledged this during her life and after her death. But it is her role in the discovery of DNA structure that has gathered the most public attention. Crick, Watson, and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their work on the structure of DNA. None gave Franklin credit for her contributions at that time. Franklin’s work on DNA have remained a silent footnote in that story had Watson not defamed her in his 1968 memoir, The Double Helix. There, he presented Franklin as “Rosy, a bad-tempered, arrogant bluestocking who jealously guarded her data from colleagues, and she was not competent to interpret it”. His book became very popular, even though many of those featured in the story-- including Crick, Wilkins, and Linus Pauling-- protested Watson’s treatment of Franklin, as did many reviewers. In 1975, Franklin’s friend Anne Sayre published a biography in angry rebuttal to Watson’s account, and Franklin’s role in the discovery became better known.
References
www.dnaftb.org/19/bio-3.html
www.biography.com/scientist/rosalindfranklin
www.https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/spotligh t/kr/feature/biographical