Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose data supplied the critical physical evidence behind the discovery of DNA's structure, a discovery that underlies modern genetic medicine. At King's College London she produced, in 1952, Photograph 51, a sharply resolved X-ray diffraction image of the B form of DNA that made its helical structure visible for the first time. Without her knowledge, this photograph and her unpublished measurements reached James Watson and Francis Crick in early 1953 and were central to the double-helix model they published that year. Franklin herself went on to lead pioneering structural studies of viruses, including polio virus, at Birkbeck College before her death from ovarian cancer at 37. Her crystallographic data is now recognized as essential, not merely supporting, evidence for the DNA structure that founded modern molecular medicine, and her exclusion from the 1962 Nobel Prize awarded to Watson, Crick and Wilkins is widely regarded as one of science's notable attribution disputes.