Rosalind Franklin – Wikipedia

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Rosalind Elsie Franklin (Born July 25, 1920 in London; died on April 16, 1958 ibid) was a British biochemist. Franklin was a specialist in the X -ray structure analysis of crystallized macromolecules. As a scientist, she did far -reaching research on the structure of coals and coke as fuel as well as viruses. Their most important research results were X -rays of the DNA and its mathematical analysis; They contributed significantly to the clarification of the DNA’s double helix structure. Her research article published on this topic with her doctoral student Raymond Gosling in April 1953 appeared in parallel to the article by James Watson and Francis Crick on the structure of the DNA and agreed with their theoretical model. The basis for the decryption of the DNA by Watson and Crick, for which they both received the Nobel Prize in 1962, were Franklin research results. Neither Franklin nor her employee Gosling received an appreciation for their research. It died four years before the award of the price of cancer, which was probably caused by X -rays during research.

Table of Contents

Family and early years [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

Rosalind Franklin came from a respected Jewish family in England. Her great -uncle Sir Herbert Samuel had just been appointed high commissioner of Palestine at the time of her birth, her father Ellis Franklin was a respected banker and her mother Muriel came from a family of intellectuals and academics.
Both parents placed emphasis on very careful school training and general education of their five children, of whom Rosalind was the second oldest. Her brother David was born in 1919, her younger brothers Colin in 1923 and Roland in 1926. Her sister Jennifer was born in 1929 when Rosalind was nine years old. [first] The Franklins made numerous trips with their children and traveled a lot abroad – rather unusual at the time. Her daughter Rosalind enjoyed these trips and also showed a lively interest in natural sciences as a six -year -old. In a letter, Rosalind’s aunt Mamie Bentwich described how Ellis Franklin’s family spent the vacation, and held on the six -year -old: “Rosalind is terrifyingly smart – out of pure pleasure she always spends her all the time with arithmetic & her bills.”

Early science training [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

The schools that Ellis and Muriel Franklin sought for their daughter supported this tendency. Rosalind spent two years in a girls’ boarding school on the canal coast and was primarily enthusiastic about scientific lessons.
From January 1932 she attended the St. Paul’s girls’ school, whose philosophy it was to prepare every girl for a professional career, and the value attached that the girls set goals beyond marriage. The school was characterized above all by excellent scientific teaching.
In the report on the inspection attendance, which the enrollment and school supervisory board of the London University of the School held in 1935, in addition to the excellent scientific building complex, the qualifications of the teachers of physics, chemistry and biology were highlighted, and the thorough and sustainable math lessons were praised.

Her biographer Brenda Maddox suspects that the scientific training that Rosalind Franklin had experienced at the St. Paul’s girls’ school significantly shaped her scientific approach. Natural science was “an intellectual exertion that demands rather cleanliness, thoroughness and endurance as excitement and daring”.

Years of studies [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

Studium in Cambridge (1938–1941) [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

In the spring of 1938, the still seventeen -year -old passed the approval tests at the University of Cambridge. In the chemical test, she cut off as the best and was therefore awarded a scholarship that covered a large part of the university fees. However, her father caused the money to be made available to one of the students who had fled to England from National Socialist Germany.

In Cambridge, both women’s colleges, Girton and Newnham, offered her a place of study. Rosalind Franklin opted for Newnham and began studying natural sciences in October 1938, which she completed in 1941.
She spent her time away from the sociable college life. She was looking for relaxation in sports; She played squash and tennis, did long bike tours and rowed.

During her studies, she increasingly specialized in crystallography and physical chemistry, which deals with structural properties and the behavior of atoms and molecules. In physical chemistry, she concluded as the best, whereupon it was made possible with a college scholarship to research in a fourth year in Cambridge.

Female students, female lecturers [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

Rosalind Franklin studied during a time when the academic training of a woman was far from a matter of course. In her Franklin biography, Brenda Maddox described the situation in which Rosalind Franklin was located as follows:

“Women had been approved in Cambridge since 1869, Jews since 1871; But unlike in Oxford, where women have been granted an academic title since 1921, women were not accepted here as ‘university members’. Also, women did not consider women as full students, but only as ‘students of the Colleges of Girton and Newnham’. They were only entitled to a title. The ‘titty title’ was a successful joke. Students were allowed to access the lectures of the men, but they were expected from them, at least until the early thirties, that they were sitting together in the front rows … The lecturers and the principal of Newnham were not allowed to take part in important university ceremonies. Rather, they expected that they were at traditional celebrations when the men wore their scarlet academics and the black, velvety doctor hats were sitting with the wives of the teaching body with a hat and gloves. ” [2]

Scientists were very difficult to recognize, especially in the scientific subjects. It was not until 1945 that the first scientists were admitted to the British Royal Society. In 1944, however, Lise Meitner, as in the following years, was the year in which Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Rosalind Franklin experienced the reluctant admission of women in the ranks of scientists not only as a student. During her entire research period, she suffered from the hesitant acceptance of researchers in her field. Especially during her research time at King’s College in London, her gender seemed to contribute to the lack of acceptance on the part of her colleagues.

Research on coal – Rosalind Franklin’s contribution to British war effort [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

The Franklins and the War [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

As British Jews, the Franklin family had carefully pursued developments in National Socialist Germany. Rosalind’s father was particularly committed when the stream of Jewish refugees increased from 1938. Ellis Franklin reduced his working hours with his bank and directed the Guarantee department of the German-Jewish refugee committee; Together with his sister Mamie Bentwich, he also founded an organization that took care of the accommodation of the German-Jewish children who arrived in England. Two of them were admitted to the Franklin family in 1938. In January 1945, Ellis Franklin was awarded the Order of Merit of the British Empire.

Rosalind himself was deeply affected by how indifferent her fellow students in Cambridge on the pogrom of German Jews in the so -called Crystal night reacted on November 9, 1938. She agreed with her father that Hitler had to be resistant to decisive resistance. There was only disagreement in what your contribution should be about collecting donations and volunteer work for the refugee organizations. From the perspective of her father, she provided her studies over everything, while her brothers risked her life for her home country. In a letter dated June 1, 1942, she wrote to him:

“… I don’t know why you come up with the idea that I would have ‘complained’ about having to give up the doctorate for war work. When I applied in research a year ago, I was asked if I wanted to do war work and I said. I was believed that the first problem I would have to deal with was war work … I [have] expressly emphasized on several occasions, contrary to the advice of my supervisors, that I would rather do war work now and only want to do my doctorate later .. ” [3]

Work at the British Coal Ualization Research Association (1942-1946) [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

She had the opportunity to work in war when a workforce from freshly graduated physicists was put together in 1942 in the newly established “British Coal Ual Ual Ual Ulization Research Association”.
Rosalind Franklin began to examine the physical-chemical properties of coal as the “Assistant Research Officer”. The aim of this examinations classified as a war was to use coal more efficiently. At the same time, she worked as a air -raid shelf that checked the darkening.

Her investigations were also the subject of her doctoral thesis; She received her doctorate (Ph.D.) in physical chemistry in 1945. The summary of her research results appeared in 1946 in the British magazine Transactions of the Faraday Society under the title Thermal expansion of coals and carbonized coals .

The French years (1947–1950) [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

Since she received no further interesting research projects after completing this work, she went to Paris in 1947 to work on the “Laboratoire Central of the Chimiques de L’Etat service”, and developed there as a specialist for crystal structure analysis. She received the position at the mediation of the French-Jewish physicist Adrienne Weill, who had worked through the National Socialists in Cambridge during the occupation of France and knew Rosalind Franklin from this time.

The laboratory, which was a state research institution, was under the direction of Jacques Mering, who, like his little more than twenty employees, appreciates Rosalind Franklin’s ability to work with complex experimental work. Under Mering’s instructions, she learned to use X -rays to analyze the inner structure of charcoal and coal. For Rosalind Franklin, not only was the work very satisfactory, she also felt very comfortable among her work colleagues. She herself was responsible for a small group of employees who used X -ray base analyzes in carbon. She documented her work in numerous essays, which in specialist journals such as the Acta Crystallographica or the Transactions The Faraday Society published. At the end of her years in Paris, she was an internationally recognized scientist in her field.

France suffered from the economic restrictions of the post -war period when Franklin lived there, in which everyday things were rationed. Franklin improvised by having groceries from England sent or, for example, to her mother’s exact dimensions for a under -rock, since the parachute silk used in England was more easily available than in France. Despite these difficult living conditions, her letters, which she addressed to her family, suggest that the years in France were among her happiest. Nevertheless, her family in particular urged her to return to England.

King’s College (1950–1953) [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

Unclear distribution of tasks [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

Molecule of the DNA; Rosalind Franklin’s work contributed significantly to the decipher of the DNA structure.

In 1950 she returned to London to continue under the direction of John Turton Randall on King’s College London. A three-year scholarship from the “Turner-and-Newall Committee” financed her research. Until the last moment she was undecided whether she should accept this scholarship or whether she should not stay in the French laboratory, where she had found so much fun at work.

One of the idiosyncrasy John Randalls, under the leadership of which the laboratory at King’s College was, was not to clearly differentiate the areas of responsibility of the employees. He wrote Rosalind Franklin shortly before her research started:

“This means that in the field of experimental X -rays only you and Gosling [Franklin’s doctoral student] will work, and Ms. Heller, a graduate of the Syracuse [University], will be available as an assistant. In cooperation with Wilkins, Gosling found that fibers from Desoxyribonucleic acid – the material sent Professor Signer from Bern – deliver remarkably good X -ray diagrams. ” [4]

At least Maurice Wilkins, who was deputy head of the laboratory, was not informed about this decision. Wilkins initially assumed that Franklin was his assistant and not a colleague that was largely equivalent. But even after this misunderstanding was informed, Wilkin’s trouble accepted Franklin, and soon the two hardly talked to each other. Both were of the opposite character: Wilkins was reluctant and hated scientific dispute, but Franklin appeared Brushing and loved intellectual discussions, although she also stealed people after her friend Norma Sutherland without noticing. [5] It was only in the fall of 1951 that Randall ensured in a clarifying three -day discussion with Wilkins and Franklin that the areas of responsibility were clearly separated between the two scientists. Franklin was supposed to work with the DNA of Signer and examine a different area than Wilkins. The unclear separation of tasks between Franklin and Wilkins continued in literature on DNA decline. Often only Wilkins is called, occasionally referred to Rosalind Franklin as his assistant. Wilkins certainly took a higher position in the laboratory; His assistant was therefore not Franklin. In this context, the words about Rosalind Franklin are to be understood, which James Watson, which was later awarded for the decryption of DNA with the Nobel Prize, in his book The double helix wrote about her:

“Maurice [Wilkins] was a beginner in the technology of X -ray beam finishing. He needed professional support and had hoped, Rosy [Note 1] [Rosalind Franklin], an experienced crystallographer, can accelerate the course of his research. But Rosy saw the situation in a completely different way. She claimed that the DNS was assigned to her as her own task, and did not think about considering himself as a Maurice assistant … One thing was clear: Rosy had to go or be referred to her right place. ” [6]

Franklin’s work situation at King’s College [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

This is not why Franklin didn’t feel comfortable at King’s College. Scientists were not accepted as equal colleagues on this traditional college. For example, women were excluded from one of the dining rooms. In addition, the majority of her colleagues did not know how to appreciate the research work she has done so far. Corresponding to John Randall and the theoretical chemist Charles Coulson, her research on coal and carbon was completely uninteresting for her other colleagues and the scientific work she did there was not assessable.

Another point contributed to Franklin’s discomfort: At King’s College, the intellectual elite of England did not work, and Rosalind Franklin clearly rose from her colleagues in the way she gave herself and in relation to her areas of interest. A friend of years, the physicist Simon Altmann, described the situation in an interview with Franklin’s biographer Maddox as follows:

“She was used to witnesses in two languages ​​[Rosalind Franklin] a civilized, intellectual life as well as conversations about painting, poetry, theater and existentialism … Now they surrounded people who had never heard of Sartre who mainly read the” Evening Standard “and Those the kind of girls liked to be on department divisions, were passed on from lap to lap and could be opened the bra. ” [7]

DNA research at King’s College [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

The scientists at King’s College had a particularly pure DNA sample available, which reminded of beet herb in their consistency. With a glass rod you could pull out of a barely perceptible fiber from DNA. If this fiber was removed, their structure showed their structure, repetitive, quasi -ristalline properties. Rosalind Franklin developed methods on how to add water to the A-Form DNA. With the help of her X -ray diagrams, Franklin was able to show that the structure of the DNA had changed after water absorption. Franklin found that DNA molecules occur in two forms, A and B, which differ in their water content. She developed a procedure to get two forms in pure form, and so she managed to record X -ray images of the highest quality. Her pictures were the best recordings of the DNA. With the help of these pictures, she found that the sugar and phosphate shares of the DNA are on the outside of the molecule and that DNA has the shape of a helix. According to its investigations, the DNA had to consist of either two, three or four spiral chains.

The hunt for the decryption of the DNA [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

The decryption of the DNA and the discovery of the double helix were “in the air” in the early 1950s.
At the end of the 1940s, it had been proven that the DNA consisted of long unexpected chain molecules. Oswald Theodore Avery had also shown in 1944 that bacteria was at least partially the DNA of the genetic information.
In 1952 Alfred D. Hershey came to similar conclusions together with his assistant Martha Chase.

Numerous scientists therefore made efforts to decipher the structure of the DNA.
Linus Pauling, who had already carried out far -reaching research on proteins, was one of the people who are most likely to be decrypting.
He had already presented his model of the Alpha-Helix structure for this in 1951.
At the beginning of 1953, Pauling published a faulty DNA model, in which he assumed three DNA threads (Franklin wrote to him immediately after the publication and explained with her analyzes why his model could not be correct). Two young scientists still unknown at the University of Cambridge, James Watson and Francis Crick – the latter had not even completed his doctorate at that time – saw a way to acquire scientific fame in this area.
However, it was clear to them that they had to come very quickly and that a quick publication would be necessary if they wanted to pass a breakthrough of Pauling.
Both were in close exchange with Maurice Wilkins from King’s College.

While Franklin preferred an empirical approach, the strength of Crick and Watson was in the development of theories.
In 1952, Crick and Watson developed a model that consisted of three spiral chains, which they had won from a lecture by Franklin at King’s College. They therefore invited Franklin and Wilkins to Cambridge at the end of 1952 to present their model of the DNA. For Franklin, the excursion was a waste of time; She rejected her colleagues that her model was completely inadequate and was annoyed by Cambridge. She also refused to work with these colleagues because she still thought a model list was premature.

On January 30, 1953, Wilkins granted this (and thus also crick) access to Franklin’s diffraction admission No. 51 with a B configuration of the DNA, which is particularly important for Watson, without having a permit from a visit to Watson. Proof of this was that the DNA was a helix. The B-shape provided significantly clearer information about the structure of the DNA than the A-shape. Watson later writes about this process in his book The double helix (1968, the following [8] ):

“To my surprise, I learned that with the help of his assistant Wilson, he had in peace and quiet, with the help of his assistant Wilson. So he did not need a long period of time to get his own research going. ” [9]

The recording No. 51 of 1952 came from Raymond Gosling, a doctoral student who first worked for Wilkins, was then subordinate to Wilkins Rosalind Franklin, but now again Wilkin’s subordinate when Franklin joined the laboratory because of the enemy atmosphere. [5]

While Wilkins and Franklin did not want to propose a detailed structural model due to this recording, this was one of the decisive moments for Watson in the decryption of the DNA, which he was in The double helix described as follows:

“The moment I saw the picture, my lower jaw worked down and my pulse fluttered. The scheme was incomparably a lot easier than everyone who had been preserved until then … [Maurice Wilkins, however, indicated that the actual problem was still the lack of a structural hypothesis that allows the bases to be arranged regularly on the inside of the spiral . Of course, this assumed that Rosy [Rosalind Franklin] was right if she wanted the bases in the center and the skeleton! Although Maurice assured me that he was now completely convinced of the correctness of her claims, I remained skeptical because Francis [Crick] and I still couldn’t understand her evidence. ” [ten]

However, Watson and Crick needed precise data, not just a photo. This data stood in a short informal research report by Rosalind Franklin to a committee of the Medical Research Council (MRC), to which Max Perutz belonged. He was part of a report by the MRC, with which individual members in the field of biophysics should be brought to the same information stand. Perutz forwarded the report in February 1953 to his colleagues in Cambridge Lawrence Bragg, who passed on the researchers Watson and Crick, who was assuming. The report was not confidential [5] [11] But Watson and Crick did not share Rosalind Franklin or someone else at King’s College that they had taken access and worked on an interpretation of the data. Ironically, Rosalind Franklin had already presented the same data essentially in a lecture at a seminar at King’s College in autumn 1951, in which Watson was present, but who, as he admitted, did not pay the necessary attention at the time and to the annoyance of Crick also did not make any notes. [5] [11] In any case, Watson and Crick concluded that this had to be a double helix. However, a publication by Franklin and Gosling was already on March 6, 1953 at the journal Acta Crystallographica received in which the DNA was correctly described as a duplication, whereby the phosphate groups were outside and the bases were connected inside by hydrogen bridges. [twelfth] It not only recognized the double helix structure (at the latest at the end of February), but also the complementary character of the nucleotides and the resulting infinite possibilities of the sequence for use as a genetic code. [5] How close the solution came Aaron Klug, her closest employee at Birkbeck College, later in two articles in nature. [13] [14] When creating an exact, mathematically and chemically strictly secured model, their Watson and Crick, which particularly feared the competition from Linus Pauling, came before. A big problem in the creation of the DNA models were the enolforms of Guanin (g) and thymine (t), which were shown in most textbooks at the time, which differed from another location of H atoms that were important for the hydrogen bonding of the bases . In a first model, Watson therefore started from a double helix with hydrogen bridge bonds between similar bases on both strands (i.e. adenin (a) with adenine, cytosine (c) with cytosin, etc.). In fact, the American crystallographer Jerry Donohue gave the crucial indication that in reality the ketoforms should be available, which could result in other combinations of hydrogen bridges, e.g. B. then mating different bases such as adenine with thymine and cytosine with guanine in two anti -parallel strands. This also resulted in a natural explanation for Erwin Chargaff’s rule of the same frequency of A and T on the one hand and G and C on the other. Watson and Crick then created the corresponding model of the double helix on March 7, whereby their performance lies in an explicit model based on the correct and complete interpretation of Franklin’s examination data, for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. In mid -March 1953, Wilkins and Franklin were invited to Cambridge to be presented to the Watson and Crick model and immediately agreed to the correctness. It was agreed that the model was published solely by Watson and Crick, the experimental data separately. [5]

In April 1953 published in the scientific magazine Nature Three articles on the structure of the DNA: In the first, Watson and Crick presented their model – and confessed in their almost one -sided article:

„We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London.“ [15]

In the next articles that followed, Wilkins and employees and Franklin and Gosling released their experimental data separately, which confirmed the Watson and Crick double helix model.
The publication of the two articles by scientists from King’s College in parallel to that of Watson and Crick was thanks to the intervention of John Randall, who wanted to make sure that his laboratory was at least recognized for the experimental work, if so Honor for the preparation of the model to scientists from Cambridge. Rosalind Franklin was no longer present at a celebration on April 25 at King’s College on the occasion of the publication of the Nature Articles because she had switched to Birkbeck College. [5] Wilkins continued the detailed experimental review of the Watson and Crick model in the following years, while Rosalind Franklin turned to other research.

Watson and Crick initially insisted that they did not know the data of Franklin’s X -ray spectographic findings from their unpublished research report. In their nature essay in 1953, they wrote against better knowledge with regard to the then printed experimental work by Franklin and Wilkins: We were not aware of the details of the results presented there when we disansed Our Structure, which reserves mainly though not entirely on published experimental data and stereochemical arguments. (We did not know the details of the results presented there when we designed our structure, which is mainly, if not completely on published experimental data and stereochemical arguments) . At the end of their essay, however, they thank Wilkins and Franklin ( We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London ). However, Watson published his book in 1968 The double helix , in which he describes his memories of this project and where he also admits that he has seen her data without Franklin knowing about it (quote from Watson’s book The double helix: “I knew more about her documents than she thought”). [16] Crick, who was later friends with Franklin, confirmed that the development of the model without Franklin’s data would not have been possible. It is not clear to what extent Rosalind Franklin knew the extent to which Watson and Crick’s work was based on their work. After Raymond Gosling, she was very aware of that. [17] But she never expressed bitterness or disappointment about it. [5]

The last few years at Birkbeck College (1953–1958) [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

Franklin switched to Birkbeck College in 1953. At King’s College they were left under the condition that they were no longer working on the DNA. Franklin led a team of scientists on Birkbeck College and published numerous articles on the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. Compared to the King’s College, the laboratory there was much worse, but it felt very comfortable in the working atmosphere there. John Desmond Bernal, under the leadership of which the laboratory there was, estimated Franklin as an excellent scientist. With her not uncomplicated manner, she also caught in Birkbeck college; However, she worked with a team that got along well with her idiosyncrasies. In particular with her employee Aaron Klug, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1982, she combined intensive collegial cooperation that provided extensive results as part of plant virus research. Among other things, she was able to prove that the tobacco mosaic virus does not compact, but tubularly as a helix.

Rosalind Franklin does not seem to have resented the questionable access to their data by Wilkins, Crick and Watson at least Francis Crick. The professionally conditional letter traffic with Francis Crick from 1956/1957 was friendly. James Watson supported her when she tried to get a scholarship for Aaron Klug. With the change from King’s College to Birkbeck College, she seemed to have completed DNA research. Since she was invited to a lecture trip to the USA in 1954 due to her coal research, which joined a second in 1956, it certainly did not lack recognition from her science colleagues. She received similar recognition for her virus research.

In autumn 1956, ovarian cancer was diagnosed at Rosalind Franklin – possibly an impact of working with X -rays. [18] She continued her research until shortly before her death in April 1958. Obituary for them appeared both in the London Times, in the journal Nature and in the New York Times. They were called a “representative of a exquisite series of pioneers that illuminated the structure of nucleoproteins in relation to virus diseases and genetics”.
In the philanthropical tradition of her wealthy family, she started as her main heritage Aaron Klug, who was able to continue his research in Great Britain with the help of this financial support.

Rosalind Franklin was an enthusiastic and daring mountaineer and a passionate traveler; Her friends and relatives described them as a fun, happy and lively partner who could handle children well.

Especially during her time in Paris, she was the point of contact for numerous friends and relatives, which she cooked with French. With her French colleagues, she met for dancing, or you were doing bathing excursions together. This is to be recorded because your picture of James Watson’s book for a long time The double helix was shaped, which she cariconed as a blue hole.

Their relationship between men was rather distant – possibly also because they thought scientific career and a marriage and children incompatible. There is a lot to indicate that she liked Jacques Mering very much. Mering, however, was not only married, but also had a very lengthy relationship with one of Franklin’s French colleagues. Franklin seems to have accepted that Mering was emotionally bound to other purposes. Immediately before she was diagnosed with cancer, a closer connection to the American scientist Donald Caspar, with which she worked for a short time at Birkbeck College.

It is now considered to be accepted that Franklin’s work provided an essential basis for the determination of the DNA structure and that it would have taken much longer until the discovery without its X-rays and analyzes. It is also undisputed that the performance of Watson and Crick was to draw the right conclusions from their work. Her long-standing employee, the later Nobel Prize winner Aaron Klug, was able to show from her notebooks that on February 23, she had proven that both the A- and B-shape of the DNA was two-chain Helices. She was only missing the realization that the base pairs of the DNA wore the genetic code. This conclusion was drawn on February 28, 1953 Watson and Crick, after she – as Watson later described in “The Double Helix” – had access to some of her X -rays without Franklin.

The Nobel Prize – which has only been awarded since 1974 at the time of the announcement of the award, and before that only to those who had been nominated before February of the award year [19] (Franklin was never nominated) [20] – in 1962 Watson, Crick and Wilkins “received” for the discovery of the molecular structure of the nucleic acids and their importance for the passing on of information in living beings “. Significantly mentioned Watson [21] and crick [22] In her Nobel Prize speeches, Rosalind Franklin, who died just four years earlier, and the key role of her data when clarifying the DNA structure with no word.

Aaron Klug, who had recently worked with her, recalled in 1982 in his Nobel Prize speech of Rosalind Franklin. [23] He pointed out how much she was his role model, and at the same time emphasized his conviction that she would also have been considered with this greatest scientific award if she had lived long enough.

In 2008 Franklin was given an honorary Horwitz Prize (Honorary Horwitz Prize) excellent. [24]

For a long time, the picture that has the posterity of Rosalind Franklin was significantly shaped by James Watson in his story in 1969 The double helix had described. Watson admitted on the first pages of his narrative that the decryption of the DNA was a “matter of 5 people”, namely – in his order – Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, Linus Pauling, Francis Crick and Watson himself. Franklin, which he always described in his book with the name “Rosy” – a nickname she had strictly rejected for everyday life – in the following words:

“She did nothing to underline her female properties. Despite her sharp features, she was not unattractive, and she would even have been adorable if she had shown the slightest interest in her clothes. She didn’t. Not even a lipstick, the color of which might have contrasted with her smooth black hair, she used, and with her one and thirty -one years she wore as imaginative dresses as just any bluish English teenager. In this respect, Rosy could be imagined as the product of an unsatisfied mother who thought it was extremely desirable that intelligent girls learned professions who saved them from marrying boring men. ” [25]

Rosalind Franklin’s lecture on her investigations, based on the first DNA model, which was still incorrectly built by Crick and Watson, was commented by Watson in the following words: “For a moment, I thought about how it would look like if she would take her glasses And tried something new with her hair. ” [26]

Watson’s biographer Ernst Peter Fischer registered the difference between the picture that Rosalind Franklin’s biographers draw from her, and the one that arises from Watson’s story, and apologized as follows:

“It remains incomprehensible how Rosalind Franklin, who is described by her biographers as intellectual, idealistic, lively and experience capable, could become the threatening” Dark Lady “in their time and in connection with Wilkins, which Jim experiences and then also in this form has included in his book. It should not be accused of not having to master the difficult situation as an inexperienced 20-year-old who has to do with the historical time-we are in the post-warland-as well as with personal status. The conversation between men and women is not easy anyway. ”
“How difficult it must have been between an immature 24-year-old young man and a mature” dark beauty “? Jim [Watson] – like all men – was likely to be afraid of women with such characteristics, especially when they suddenly entered men’s worlds. ” [27]

However, despite such knowledge, Rosalind remained characterized by NORMALLY THE NOTES OF THE NOTES THE NATIONATIVE SCHADENING Sections in Watson, although this ended with conciliatory and appreciative words:

“In 1958 Rosalind Franklin died at the age of 37. Since my first impressions of her (recorded in this book) have largely proven to be wrong – both in a personal and scientific point of view – I would like to say something about her scientific achievements here. Your X-ray work in the King’s laboratory is becoming more and more recognized. The mere fact that they differed in the A and B shape of the DNS would have been enough to make them famous. But her performance was even greater when she provided evidence in 1952 with the help of Patterson’s super position methods that the phosphate groups on the outside of the DNS molecule must be. …. I had a chair in the States in the meantime and therefore I couldn’t see it as often as Francis, whom she often visited to get advice or if she had brought something particularly pretty to make sure, to make sure, whether he agreed with her reasons. All of our previous pissankings have long been forgotten and we both learned to appreciate their personal sincerity and great custody. A few years too late, we became aware of what battles an intelligent woman has to be recognized by the scientists who often only see a distraction of serious thinking in women. Rosalind’s integrity and her exemplary courage were apparently visible to everyone who experienced how she knew that she was terminally ill, never complained and continued her work at a high level until a few weeks before her death. ” [28]

In a book first published in 1997, Paul Strathern wrote about Rosalind Franklin, which he addressed in contrast to her male colleagues with the first name:

“Rosalind was highly intelligent and very attractive, even if she did without make-up and dressed without everyone. But Great Britain remained in the Stone Age during the 1950s when it came to relationships between the sexes. Wilkins simply had no idea what to do in his laboratory with a woman. ” [29]

This primarily reduced perception of an excellent scientist helped to ensure that Rosalind Franklin became a often cited example of the discrimination against women in science (see also Matilda effect), which is ultimately a stronger appreciation of her contribution to the DNA -resulted in. The fact that her name is known to a wider public today can also be seen in 1987 by the BBC in the series Horizon Documentation sent, in which she was embodied by Juliet Stevenson and represented Jeff Goldblum James Watson. In the meantime, a residential building for graduated students of Newnham College is wearing its name, and in the garden in front of it is a bust that is reminiscent of Rosalind Franklin. In the National Portrait Gallery in London, her photo hangs next to that of Watson, Wilkins and Crick. The King’s College inaugurated a Franklin Wilkins building in 2000 and at the same time honored Maurice Wilkins, who worked there 53 years, and Rosalind Franklin, who only worked there a little more than two years and never felt comfortable.

At the Dutch University of Groningen, the five years was used to promote women in natural science Rosalind Franklin Fellowship (Research scholarship). The well -endowed scholarship is intended to help establish more professors in the natural sciences.

Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science (2013)

In 2004 the Finch University of Health Sciences, Lake County (Illinois), changed in North Chicago, Lake County (Illinois) in Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. The university’s logo shows Rosalind Franklin’s photo 51, which was decisive for the clarification of the DNA structure.

In 2018, the British Rosalind Franklin Institute (RFI) was founded on the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus south of Oxford. [30] It is close to a large synchrotron radiation source (Diamond Light Source), a source for X-rays, and is intended to serve biological research with the latest technologies. One of their first projects is the development of an ultra -fast camera it high resolution for tissue examinations. [thirty first]

The Royal Society has been awarding the Rosalind Franklin Award To promote women in science and technology. The Institute of Physics has been awarding Rosalind Franklin Medal and Prize for applications of physics in biology since 2008. [32]

Rosalind-Franklin-Strasse [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

On October 31, 2016, the city of Kiel, the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel and its Faculty of Medicine and the University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein named a street within the university clinic in honor of Rosalind Franklin as a pioneer and model of molecular genetic medicine.

In Hennef there is a Rosalind Franklin-Straße.

Since 2018 there has been a Rosalind-Franklin-Straße on the Beutenberg science campus in Jena.

Mars rover of the ESA Rosalind-Franklin [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

Mars Rover Exomars, who is to be sent to Mars by the European Space Agency ESA to look for traces of life, was named after Franklin. [33]

Play Photo 51 [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

The stage play Photo 51 The American author Anna Ziegler, who tells the life story of Franklin, had a premiere on 2008 Vernacular Theatre in Maryland and on October 27, 2010 on Ensemble Studio Theater in New York. In 2015, theater and film director Michael Grandage staged the play with Nicole Kidman in the leading role in the London Westend. In January 2016 it became known that Grandage also wanted to film the piece with Kidman. [34] Was in Germany Photograph 51 2012 to see at the English Theater Berlin. The German -language premiere under the title Photo 51 took place in January 2017 at the Hamburg Ernst-German Theater.

Blue Plaque [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

In 1992 a Blue Plaque was built in honor on Donovan Court. [35]

The publication on DNA in 1953 [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

Biography [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

  • Anne Sayre: Rosalind Franklin and DNA . W. W. Norton & Co., New York 1975.
  • Jenifer Glynn: Rosalind Franklin, 1920–1958. In: E. Shils, C. Blacker (ed.): Cambridge Women – Twelve Portraits. University Press, Cambridge 1995. ISBN 0-521-48287-9
  • Brenda Maddox: Rosalind Franklin. The discovery of the DNA or the struggle of a woman for scientific recognition. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2002. ISBN 3-593-37192-8 (quoted p. 25, p. 42)
  • Svetlana Bandoim: Gender Bias in Science, an Analysis of the Careers of Kathleen Lonsdale, Dorothy Hodgkin, and Rosalind Franklin , OCLC 75182013 (Thesis (B.S.), Butler University Indianapolis, 2006).
  • Jenifer Glynn: My Sister Rosalind Franklin: A Family Memoir. Oxford University Press, New York 2012. ISBN 978-0-19-969962-9.

Essays [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

  • Moritz Aisslinger: It was it. Subtitle: At the beginning of the 1950s: Researcher Rosalind Franklin comes very close to the secret of life. But three men cheat on the wages of their work – and receive the Nobel Prize. In: Die Zeit No. 42 of October 13, 2022, pp. 15–17 (with updates in the online version on October 16)) [36]
  • Matthew Cobb: Sexism in science: did Watson and Crick really steal Rosalind Franklin’s data? , The Guardian, 23. Juni 2015, Online
  • Lynne Elkin: Rosalind Franklin and the Double Helix , Physics today, Volume 56, March 2003, p. 42
  • Aaron Klug: Rosalind Franklin and the Discovery of the Structure of DNA , Nature, Band 219, August 1968, S. 808–810, 833–844.
  • Aaron Klug: Rosalind Franklin and the Double Helix , Nature, Band 248, April 1974, S. 78.
  • Brenda Maddox: The double helix and the “wronged” heroine , Nature, Band 421, 2003, S. 407–408

Literature on the history of DNA decision-making [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

  • James D. Watson: The double helix. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1968, 1993. ISBN 3-499-16803-0 (quoted p. 27f, p. 65, p. 131, p. 134)
  • Ernst Peter Fischer: In the beginning was the double helix – James D. Watson and the new science of life. Ullstein, Munich 2003. ISBN 3-550-07566-9 (the p. 159ff.)
  • Horace Freeland Judson; The eighth day of creation: makers of the revolution in biology , Touchstone Books 1979, 2. Auflage Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 1996
  • Aaron Klug: The Discovery of the Double Helix. In: T. Krude (ed.): DNA, Changing Science and Society. University Press, Cambridge 2003. ISBN 0-521-82378-1
  • Paul Strathern: Crick, Watson & die DNA. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1998. ISBN 3-596-14112-5 (first published in English in 1997, quoted p. 52f)
  • Robert Olby: The Path to the Double Helix. The Discovery of DNA. Dover 1994. ISBN 0-486-68117-3
  • Maurice Wilkins: The third man of the double helix , Oxford University Press 2003

Fiction [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

  1. ↑ Franklin rejected this nickname; See the section on the relationship between Franklin and Watson.

Individually [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

  1. ↑ Jenifer Glynn: My Sister Rosalind Franklin . Oxford University Press, 2012.
  2. ↑ Cambridge had admitted women since 1869, and Jews since 1871, but unlike Oxford, which had granted women degrees since 1921, it refused to accept them as ‘members of the University’. Nor were the female students considered undergraduates, merely ‘students of Girton and Newnham Colleges’. They were not entitled to the degree of BA Cantab., or to any degree at all, but rather to ‘decrees titular’. The ‘decree tit’ made a good joke. Female students were admitted to men’s lectures but, at least until the early 1930s, were expected to sit together in the front rows. , The mistress of Girton and the principal of Newnham were not allowed to participate in university ceremonies and functions but were required instead to sit, in hat and gloves, with the wives of the faculty at the ritual occasions when the men wore their scarlet academic robes and black velvet doctors’ hats. Maddox, Rosalind Franklin, the dark lady of DNA, Harper Collins 2002, S. 44
  3. ↑ Maddox, Rosalind Franklin, the dark lady of DNA, Harper Collins 2002, S. 74
  4. ↑ This means that as far as the experimental X-ray effort is concerned there will be at the moment only yourself and Gosling, together with the temporary assistance of a graduate from Syracuse, Mrs Heller. Gosling, working in conjunction with Wilkins, has already found that fibres of desoxyribose nucleic acid derived from material provided by Professor Signer of Berne give remarkably good fibre diagrams. , Maddox, Rosalind Franklin, the dark lady of DNA, Harper Collins 2002, S. 150
  5. ↑ a b c d It is f g h Matthew Cobb: Sexism in science: did Watson and Crick really steal Rosalind Franklin’s data?, The Guardian, 23. Juni 2015
  6. ↑ Maurice, a beginner in X-ray diffraction work, wanted some professional help and hoped that Rosy, a trained crystallographer, could speed up his research. Rosy, however, did not see the situation this way. She claimed that she had been given DNA for her own problem and would not think of herself as Maurice’s assistant . James D. Watson, The Double Helix, Scribner 1998, S. 16, Clearly Rosy had to go or to be put in her place , S. 17
  7. ↑ „Very well read in two languages, she was used to a civilised intellectual life, discussing painting, poetry, theatre and existentialism,“ he said, Now she found herself among people who had never heard of Sartre, whose chief reading was the Evening Standard, and who enjoyed ‘the type of girls that would get drunk at departmental parties and be passed from lap to lap having their bra undone’. , Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, Harper Collins 2002, S. 138
  8. ↑ Edition from 1968 and later changed editions – James D. Watson: The double helix , Rowohlt-Verlag, 20th edition (2007), ISBN 978-3-499-60255-9
  9. ↑ To my surprise, he revealed that with the help of his assistant Wilson he had quietly been duplicating some of Rosy’s and Gosling’s X-ray work. Thus there need not be a large time gap before Maurice’s research efforts were in full swing. , Watson, The Double Helix, Scribner 1998, S. 167
  10. ↑ The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race. , …, The real problem was the absence of any structural hypothesis which would allow them to pack the bases regularly in the inside of the helix. Of course this presumed that Rosy had hit it right in wanting the bases in the center and the backbone outside. Though Maurice told me he was now quite convinced she was correct, I remained skeptical, for her evidence was still out of the reach of Francis and me. Watson, The Double Helix, Scribner, 1998, Kapitel 23
  11. ↑ a b Max Perutz, DNA Helix, letters to Science, June 27, 1969, p. 1537.
  12. ↑ The Structure of Sodium Thymonucleate Fibres. I. The Influence of Water Content BY ROSALIND E. FRANKLIN AND R. G. GOSLING, Acta Cryst. (1953) 6, 673–677.
  13. ↑ Klug, Rosalind Franklin and the discovery of the structure of DNA, Nature, Band 219, 1968, S. 808–810, 843–844
  14. ↑ Aaron Klug, Rosalind Franklin and the Double Helix, Nature, Band 248, 1974, S. 787–788
  15. ↑ Watson, Crick, A Structure for Desoxyribose Nucleic Acid, Nature, Band 171, 1953, S. 737
  16. ↑ I was more aware of her data than she realized. , Watson, Double Helix, Scribner 1998, S. 165
  17. ↑ Naomi Attar: Raymond Gosling: the man who crystallized genes , Genome Biology, Band 14, Nr. 402, 25. April, 2013
  18. ↑ The four protagonists – once and now , NZZ, April 23, 2003
  19. ↑ Nobel prize to be awarded to dead scientist , The Guardian 2011
  20. ↑ Stephanie Pappas: Newfound Nobel Letters Reveal Secrets of DNA Prize , Live Science, 24. April 2013
  21. ↑ Nobel price speech James Watson
  22. ↑ Nobelstrike frienis crick
  23. ↑ Nobel price speech Aaron Klug
  24. ↑ Columbia University Medical Center: Past Recipients of the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize
  25. ↑ By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents. So it was quite easy to imagine her the product of an unsatisfied mother who unduly stressed the desirability of professional careers that could save bright girls from marriages to dull men. Watson, Double Helix, Scribner 1972, S. 17
  26. ↑ Momentarily I wondered how she would look if she took off her glasses and did something novel with her hair. Watson, Double Helix, Scribner 1998, S. 69
  27. ↑ Ernst Peter Fischer: In the beginning was the double helix – James D. Watson and the new science of life. Ullstein, Munich 2003, 159ff.
  28. ↑ In 1958, Rosalind Franklin died at the early age of thirty-seven. Since my initial impressions of her, both scientific and personal (as recorded in the early pages of this book), were often wrong, I want to say something here about her achievements. The X-ray work she did at King’s is increasingly regarded as superb. The sorting out of the A and B forms, by itself, would have made her reputation; even better was her 1952 demonstration, using Patterson superposition methods, that the phosphate groups must be on the outside of the DNA molecule. …. Because I was then teaching in the States, I did not see her as often as did Francis, to whom she frequently came for advice or when she had done something very pretty, to be sure he agreed with her reasoning. By then all traces of our early bickering were forgotten, and we both came to appreciate greatly her personal honesty and generosity, realizing years too late the struggles that the intelligent woman faces to be accepted by a scientific world which often regards women as mere diversions from serious thinking. Rosalind’s exemplary courage and integrity were apparent to all when, knowing she was mortally ill, she did not complain but continued working on a high level until a few weeks before her death. Watson, Double Helix, Scribner 1998, Epilog, S. 225 f
  29. ↑ Strathern: Crick, Watson & die DNA. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1998. S. 52f
  30. ↑ Official website of the Rosalind Franklin Institute
  31. ↑ Rosalind Franklin Institute will ‘transform’ life sciences research through disruptive technologies , University of Oxford, 6. Juni 2018
  32. ↑ Rosalind Franklin Medal and Prize , IOP
  33. ↑ THAT: ESA’s Mars rover has a name – Rosalind Franklin. Accessed on February 9, 2019 .
  34. ↑ After “Genius” another offer for Nicole Kidman ( Memento from March 5, 2016 in Internet Archive ). In: Die Zeit Online, January 13, 2016.
  35. ↑ Rosalind Franklin | Crystallographer | Blue Plaques. Accessed on February 17, 2023 .
  36. ↑ To issue no. 42 of October 13, 2022 Die Completion of the article behind the payment barrier of the time publisher. Published in its article series: Stern hours of humanity. (With 2 photos of her from the 1950s and a copy of the Franklin-Photo 51 of May 2, 1952)