Rosalind Franklin, a British physical chemist whose groundbreaking work led to the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA was born on July 25, 1920 in London, England. She went to one of the few girls' schools in London and at age fifteen wanted to become a scientist. Against her father's wishes, Franklin entered Newnham College in Cambridge in 1938 and graduated in 1941. She had a graduate fellowship for one year but quit in 1942 to work at the British Coal Utilization Research Association. While there she did research on the physical structure of carbon and coal. Franklin published five papers on this work and seventeen articles on the structures of carbon and coal total. In 1945 she obtained her Ph. D. in physical chemistry from Cambridge University. Franklin went to Paris at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de L'Etat from 1947 to 1950. During her stay in Paris she learned x-ray diffraction methods to study the structure of carbon.
In 1951 Franklin went back to England as a research associate for John Randall's laboratory at King's College, Cambridge. At Randall's lab, she met Maurice Wilkins for the first time but they both had separate projects and research groups. She was given responsibility over the DNA project while Wilkins was away. When he returned, he mistakenly treated her as a lowly technical assistant. Even after he realized his blunder, Wilkins never changed his attitude towards Franklin. This was possibly due to the fact that at the time women weren't numerous or respected in the field of science. Franklin continued her DNA research with the slight friction at the laboratory. Using her own technique, she took photographs of the DNA molecule, which clearly showed a helical structure. During that time no one else was able to take such photographs. She also identified the location of phosphate sugars in DNA. 1951 through 1953, Franklin came extremely close to finding the structure of DNA but was beaten in publication by American biochemist James Watson and British biochemist Francis Crick. Without her knowledge or permission her important data concerning DNA structure was showed to Watson and Crick. Wilkin's shared with Watson one of Franklin's crystallographic photos of DNA. Once seeing the photos, Watson and Crick easily figured the structure out and published their article in the science journal Nature. An article by Franklin appeared in the same issue on her work. She later published five other articles relating to DNA structure. Four years after her death, James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize for the double-helix model of DNA in 1962.
In the spring of 1953, Franklin moved to J. D. Bernal's laboratory at Birkbeck College. While researching there, she worked on the tobacco mosaic virus and the polio virus. In the summer of 1956, she became ill with ovarian cancer. Rosalind Franklin died April 16, 1958 in London, England from cancer at the age of thirty-seven. Even after her death there still is much controversy on whether or not she would have been awarded the Nobel Prize with Watson, Crick and Wilkins if she had lived.
Source
0 comments:
Post a Comment