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The Manhattan Project Heritage Preservation Association, Inc. "Preserving, Exhibiting, Interpreting and Teaching the History of the Manhattan Project" |
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Rosalind Franklin
England: 1920 - 1958
Made important discoveries about the molecular structure of coal and carbon, which were later used to develop strong carbon fibers and to slow reactions in nuclear power plantsFirst to discover the structure of DNA
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| Rosalind Franklin
was educated at Cambridge University over the opposition of her father,
who thought she should stay at home and do volunteer work.
Obtaining her doctorate in 1945, Franklin moved to Paris to study the
branch of physics known as x-ray crystallography.
In this technique, a beam of x-rays is sent through a crystal. When the x-rays strike atoms in the crystal, they bounce off at an angle and make an image on photographic film. By studying these pictures, crystallographers can figure out how the atoms are arranged. In 1953, a fellow researcher in Franklin's lab, Maurice Wilkins, gave American chemist James Watson a copy of Franklin's original DNA data without her knowledge. With this information, Watson, and his English colleague, Francis Crick, who had been struggling to decipher DNA, had the final piece they needed to support their theory of the structure. They would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 for their work. Franklin was never fully credited for her contribution to their work. However, she is generally regarded as the first to discover the structure of DNA. Rosalind Franklin died in 1958 of cervical cancer.
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