Rosalind franklin biography summary of winston

As Franklin considered the double helix, she also realised that the structure would not depend on the detailed order of the bases, and noted that "an infinite variety of nucleotide sequences would be possible to explain the biological specificity of DNA". Comfortof Johns Hopkins Universityand Matthew Cobbof the University of Manchesterexplained that "She did not have time to make these final leaps, because Watson and Crick beat her to the answer.

Weeks later, on 10 April, Franklin wrote to Crick for permission to see their model. She is reported to have commented, "It's very pretty, but how are they going to prove it? Accordingly, her response to the Watson—Crick model was in keeping with her cautious approach to science. Crick and Watson published their model in Nature on 25 Aprilin an article describing the double-helical structure of DNA with only a footnote acknowledging "having been stimulated by a general knowledge of Franklin and Wilkins' 'unpublished' contribution.

As a result of a deal struck by the two laboratory directors, articles by Wilkins and Franklin, which included their X-ray diffraction data, were modified and then published second and third in the same issue of Natureseemingly only in support of the Crick and Watson theoretical paper which proposed a model for the B-DNA. At first mainly geneticists embraced the model because of its obvious genetic implications.

Franklin left King's College London in mid-March for Birkbeck Collegein a move that had been planned for some time and that she described in a letter to Adrienne Weill in Paris as "moving from a palace to the slums Her new laboratories were housed in 21 Torrington Square, one of a pair of dilapidated and cramped Georgian houses containing several different departments; Franklin frequently took Bernal to task over the careless attitudes of some of the other laboratory staff, notably after workers in the pharmacy department flooded her first-floor laboratory with water on one occasion.

Despite the parting words of Bernal to stop her interest in nucleic acids, Franklin helped Gosling to finish his thesis, although she was no longer his official supervisor. Despite the ARC funding, Franklin wrote to Bernal that the existing facilities remained highly unsuited for conducting research " Her meeting with Aaron Klug in early led to a longstanding and successful collaboration.

They soon discovered published in that the covering of TMV was protein molecules arranged in helices. InCaspar and Franklin published individual but complementary papers in the 10 March issue of Naturein which they showed that the RNA in TMV is wound along the inner surface of the hollow virus. Franklin's research grant from ARC expired at the end ofand she was never given the full salary proposed by Birkbeck.

Her materials included table tennis balls and plastic bicycle handlebar grips. In Franklin visited the University of California, Berkeleywhere colleagues suggested her group research the polio virus. She obtained Bernal's consent in Julythough serious concerns were raised after Franklin disclosed her intentions to research live, instead of killed, polio virus at Birkbeck.

Rosalind franklin biography summary of winston: Of the four DNA researchers, only

Eventually, Bernal arranged for the virus to be safely stored at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine during the group's research. With her group, Franklin then commenced deciphering the structure of the polio virus while it was in a crystalline state. She attempted to mount the virus crystals in capillary tubes for X-ray studies, but was forced to end her work due to her rapidly failing health.

After Franklin's death Klug succeeded her as group leader, and he, Finch and Holmes continued researching the structure of the polio virus. They eventually succeeded in obtaining extremely detailed X-ray images of the virus. In June Klug and Finch published the group's findings, revealing the polio virus to have icosahedral symmetry, and in the same paper suggested the possibility for all spherical viruses to possess the same symmetry, as it permitted the greatest possible number 60 of identical structural units.

Franklin was best described as an agnostic.

Rosalind franklin biography summary of winston: Rosalind Elsie Franklin (25

Her lack of religious faith apparently did not stem from anyone's influence, rather from her own line of thinking. She developed her scepticism as a young child. Her mother recalled that she refused to believe in the existence of Godand remarked, "Well, anyhow, how do you know He isn't She? Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life I do not accept your definition of faith i.

Your faith rests on the future of yourself and others as individuals, mine in the future and fate of our successors. It seems to me that yours is the more selfish A creator of what? I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our insignificant race in a tiny corner of the universe.

However, Franklin did not abandon Jewish traditions. As the only Jewish student at Lindores School, she had Hebrew lessons on her own while her friends went to church. Franklin loved travelling abroad, particularly trekking. She first "qualified" at Christmas for a vacation at MentonFrance, where her grandfather went to escape the English winter.

A trip to France in gave Franklin a lasting love for France and its language. She considered the French lifestyle at that time as "vastly superior to that of English". Franklin slipped off a slope, and was barely rescued. I love the people, the country and the food. In the s, she visited Slovenia one or more times where she held a lecture on coal in Ljubljana and visited the Julian Alps Triglav and Bled.

She also collaborated with the Croatian physicist Katarina Kranjc. She held lectures in Zagreb and Belgrade and visited Dalmatia. Franklin made several professional trips to the United States, and was particularly jovial among her American friends and constantly displayed her sense of humour. William Ginoza of the University of California, Los Angeleslater recalled that Franklin was the opposite of Watson's description of her, and as Maddox comments, Americans enjoyed her "sunny side".

He paints a sympathetic but sometimes critical portrait of Franklin.

Rosalind franklin biography summary of winston: Franklin was a London-born Jewish woman

He praises her intellect and scientific acumen, but portrays Franklin as difficult to work with and careless with her appearance. After introducing her in the book as "Rosalind", he writes that he and his male colleagues usually referred to her as "Rosy", the name people at King's College London used behind her back. In the family, she was called "Ros".

She made it clear to an American visiting friend, Dorothea Raacke, while sitting with her at Crick's table in The Eagle pub in Cambridge: Raacke asked her how she would like to be addressed, she replied "I'm afraid it will have to be Rosalind", adding "Most definitely not Rosy. Franklin often expressed her political views. She initially blamed Winston Churchill for inciting the war, but later admired him for his speeches.

Franklin actively supported Professor John Ryle as an independent candidate for parliament in the Cambridge University by-electionbut he was unsuccessful. Franklin did not seem to have an intimate relationship with anyone, and always kept her deepest personal feelings to herself. After her younger days, she avoided close friendship with the opposite sex.

In her later years, Evi Ellis, who had shared her bedroom when a child refugee and who was then married to Ernst Wohlgemuth [ 29 ] and had moved to Notting Hill from Chicago, tried matchmaking her with Ralph Miliband but failed. Franklin once told Evi that a man who had a flat on the same floor as hers asked if she would like to come in for a drink, but she did not understand the intention.

Franklin's closest personal affair was probably with her once post-doctoral student Donald Caspar. Inshe visited him at his home in Colorado after her tour to University of California, Berkeleyand she was known to remark later that Caspar was one "she might have loved, might have married". In her letter to Sayre, Franklin described him as "an ideal match".

In mid, while on a work-related trip to the United States, Franklin first began to suspect a health problem. While in New York, she found difficulty in zipping her skirt; her stomach had bulged. These included Anne Sayre, Francis Crick, his wife Odile, with whom Franklin had formed a strong friendship, [ ] and finally with the Roland and Nina Franklin family where Rosalind's nieces and nephews bolstered her spirits.

Franklin chose not to stay with her parents because her mother's uncontrollable grief and crying upset her too much. Even while undergoing cancer treatment, Franklin continued to work, and her group continued to produce results — seven papers in and six more in On 2 December she made her will. The remainder of the estate was to be used for charities.

Franklin returned to work in January and was also given a promotion to Research Associate in Biophysics on 25 February. Exposure to X-ray radiation is sometimes considered to be a possible factor in Franklin's illness. The inscription on her tombstone reads: [ ] [ ]. King's College London as an institution, was not distinguished for the welcome that it offered to women FellDirector of Strangeways Laboratorysupervised the biologists".

Sayre asserts that "while the male staff at King's lunched in a large, comfortable, rather clubby dining room" the female staff of all ranks "lunched in the student's hall or away from the premises". Sayre also discusses at length Franklin's struggle in pursuing science, particularly her father's concern about women in academic professions.

Rosalind franklin biography summary of winston: Rosalind Franklin was born

A good deal of information explicitly claims that he strongly opposed her entering Newnham College. Sexism is said to pervade the memoir of one peer, James Watson, in his book The Double Helixpublished 10 years after Franklin's death and after Watson had returned from Cambridge to Harvard. Glynn accuses Sayre of erroneously making her sister a feminist heroine, [ ] and sees Watson's The Double Helix as the root of what she calls the "Rosalind Industry".

She conjectures that the stories of alleged sexism would "have embarrassed her [Rosalind Franklin] almost as much as Watson's account would have upset her", [ 5 ] and declared that "she [Rosalind] was never a feminist. Franklin's letter to her parents in January is often taken as reflecting her own prejudiced attitude, and the claim that she was "not immune to the sexism rampant in these circles".

In the letter, she remarked that one lecturer was "very good, though female". In fact, Maddox says, Franklin laughed at men who were embarrassed by the appointment of the first female professor, Dorothy Garrod. Franklin's first important contributions to the model popularised by Crick and Watson was her lecture at the seminar in Novemberwhere she presented to those present, among them Watson, the two forms of the molecule, type A and type B, her position being that the phosphate units are located in the external part of the molecule.

She also specified the amount of water to be found in the molecule in accordance with other parts of it, data that have considerable importance for the stability of the molecule. Franklin was the first to discover and articulate these facts, which constituted the basis for all later attempts to build a model of the molecule. However, Watson, at the time ignorant of the chemistry, failed to comprehend the crucial information, and this led to the construction of an incorrect three-helical model.

The other contribution included a photograph of an X-ray diffaction pattern of B-DNA called Photo 51[ ] taken by Franklin's student Gosling, that was briefly shown to Watson by Wilkins in January[ ] [ ] and a rosalind franklin biography summary of winston written for an MRC biophysics committee visit to King's in December which was shown by Perutz at the Cavendish Laboratory to both Crick and Watson.

This MRC report contained data from the King's group, including some of Franklin's and Gosling's work, and was given to Crick — who was working on his thesis on haemoglobin structure — by his thesis supervisor Perutz, a member of the visiting committee. Sayre's biography of Franklin contains a story [ ] alleging that the photograph 51 in question was shown to Watson by Wilkins without Franklin's permission, [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] and that this constituted a case of bad science ethics.

There was allegedly nothing untoward in this transfer of data to Wilkins [ ] [ ] because Director Randall had insisted that all DNA work belonged exclusively to King's. He had therefore instructed Franklin, in a letter, to even stop working on it and submit her data. Likewise, Perutz saw "no harm" in showing an MRC report containing the conclusions of Franklin and Gosling's X-ray data analysis to Crick, since it had not been marked as confidential, although "The report was not expected to reach outside eyes".

Perutz also claimed that the MRC information was already made available to the Cambridge team when Watson had attended Franklin's seminar in November A preliminary version of much of the important material contained in the December MRC report had been presented by Franklin in a talk she had given in Novemberwhich Watson had attended but not understood.

The Perutz letter was, as said, one of three, published with others by Wilkins and Watson, which discussed their various contributions. Watson clarified the importance of the data obtained from the MRC report as he had not recorded these data while attending Franklin's lecture in The upshot of all this was that, when Crick and Watson started to build their model, in Februarythey were working with critical parameters that had been determined by Franklin inwhich she and Gosling had significantly refined inas well as with published data and other very similar data to those available at King's.

It was generally believed that Franklin was never aware that her work had been used during construction of the model, [ ] but Gosling, when asked in his interview if he believed she learned of this before her death, asserted "Yes. Oh, she did know about that. In an unpublished article for Time magazine in revealed two documents that showed a close collaboration of Franklin with Watson and Crick.

It was prepared in consultation with Franklin, [ ] who saw that Bruce's scientific presentation was not good enough for an article. Bruce clearly mentioned that "they [Franklin and Wilkins with Watson and Crick] linked up, confirming each other's work from time to time, or wrestling over a common problem," and that Franklin was often "checking the Cavendish model against her own X-rays, not always confirming the Cavendish structural theory.

Upon the completion of their model, Crick and Watson had invited Wilkins to be a co-author of their paper describing the structure. Some, including Maddox, have explained this citation omission by suggesting that it may be a question of circumstance, because it would have been very difficult to cite the unpublished work from the MRC report they had seen.

Indeed, a clear timely acknowledgment would have been awkward, given the unorthodox manner in which data were transferred from King's to Cambridge. However, methods were available. Watson and Crick could have cited the MRC report as a personal communication or else cited the Acta articles in press, or most easily, the third Nature paper that they knew was in press.

One of the most important accomplishments of Maddox's widely acclaimed biography is that Maddox made a well-received case for inadequate acknowledgement. Fifteen years after the fact the first clear recitation of Franklin's contribution appeared as it permeated Watson's account, The Double Helixalthough it was buried under descriptions of Watson's often quite negative regard towards Franklin during the period of their work on DNA.

This attitude is epitomized in the confrontation between Watson and Franklin over a preprint of Pauling's mistaken DNA manuscript. Sayre's early analysis was often ignored because of perceived feminist overtones in her book. Watson and Crick did not cite the X-ray diffraction work of Wilkins and Franklin in their original paper, though they admit having "been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr.

Wilkins, Dr. Franklin and their co-workers at King's College London". Franklin and Gosling's publication of the DNA X-ray image, in the same issue of Natureserved as the principal evidence:. Thus our general ideas are not inconsistent with the model proposed by Watson and Crick in the preceding communication. Franklin was never nominated for a Nobel Prize.

It took Wilkins and his colleagues about seven years to collect enough data to prove and refine the proposed DNA structure. Moreover, its biological significance, as proposed by Watson and Crick, was not established. General acceptance for the DNA double helix and its function did not start until late in the s, leading to Nobel nominations in, and for Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and in for Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

This DNA replication was firmly established by after further demonstration in other species, [ ] and of the stepwise chemical reaction. I myself feel that it is likely that the general nature of the Watson-Crick structure is correct, but that there is doubt about details. Aaron Klug, Franklin's colleague and principal beneficiary in her will, was the sole winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry"for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes".

The film portrayed Franklin as somewhat stern, but also alleged that Watson and Crick did use a lot of her work to do theirs. Another play, Photograph 51 by Anna Zieglerpublished in[ ] has been produced at several places in the US [ ] and in late was put on at the Noel Coward Theatre, London, with Nicole Kidman playing Franklin. Although sometimes altering history for dramatic effect, the play nevertheless illuminates many of the key issues of how science was and is conducted.

False Assumptions by Lawrence Aronovitch is a play about the life of Marie Curie in which Franklin is portrayed as frustrated and angry at the lack of recognition for her scientific contributions. Franklin was noted as the chemist who "actually discovered DNA" in episode three of the Netflix series Daybreak. Franklin's image appeared in Pfizer 's Super Bowl commercial alongside other notable scientific pioneers.

Rosalind Franklin's most notable publications are listed below. The last two were published posthumously. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikidata item. This is the latest accepted revisionreviewed on 26 January British X-ray crystallographer — This article is about the chemist.

For the Mars rover named after her, see Rosalind Franklin rover. Franklin with a rosalind franklin biography summary of winston in Notting HillLondon, England. ChelseaLondon, England. Physical chemistry X-ray crystallography. John Finch Kenneth Holmes. Early life [ edit ]. Educational opportunity were also very limited. She passed her final exams with distinction and inwent to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied chemistry as part of the Natural Sciences Tripos.

After finishing her degree, Franklin worked for one year as a research fellowship under Ronald Norrish of Cambridge University. However, finding Norrish overbearing and difficult to work with, she left and found employment with the British Coal Research Association near Kingston Upon Thames. Her work involved investigating the permeability of coal.

This work formed the backbone of her PhD thesis on the physical chemistry of organic colloids. During the war, she also served for a period as an Air Raid Warden. This was a useful position, and she learnt X-Ray diffraction techniques, which would prove important for her later work on DNA. The photos also suggested a helix structure, though not all were convinced.

When, at a later date, James Watson, a scientist working on his own DNA structure in Cambridge saw these photos, he remarked. Norrish recognized Franklin's potential but he was not very encouraging or supportive toward his female student. 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 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. InFranklin 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. 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. She completed her undergraduate degree inbut, as women were not allowed to receive degrees from Cambridge at the time, she was only awarded an honorary degree. Franklin went on to earn her Ph. After the war, Franklin moved to Paris, where she conducted research on X-ray crystallography.

Franklin's research focused on using X-ray diffraction to analyze DNA fibers. She made significant advancements in the field, producing high-quality X-ray images of DNA.