An excellent example of Rosalind Franklin’s (1920-58) important contribution to the discovery of DNA. This is one of two articles Franklin published in Nature in 1953 regarding the newly discovered DNA structure.
“Few people outside of the scientific community know of Rosalind Franklin, an accomplished X-ray crystallographer, chemist, and molecular biologist. Fewer still are aware that it was Rosalind Franklin’s clear X-ray photographs that established unequivocally the structure of DNA. It would be nearly impossible to name a scientific discovery in the last century, except for Einstein’s theory of relativity, that had as much of an impact as that of the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule” (Rapoport, 316).
“I was shown Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray photograph, and whoa! It was a helix! And a month later, we had a structure” (Watson).
ODNB adds: “Watson had put forward the hypothesis that the large rod-shaped virus particle was composed of a helical arrangement of small protein molecules (or subunits). Franklin showed that this was, in essence, correct. Using her improved techniques, she was able to obtain spectacular, and beautiful X-ray patterns of the virus, of such clarity that she could begin a quantitative analysis of the structure. In four short years, together with a small devoted group of students and collaborators, she determined the precise helical geometry of the protein units, and above all showed that the ribonucleic acid (RNA) of the virus, the carrier of the infectivity, in other words of the genetic information, formed a long single chain embedded deeply within the protein framework.”
Rapoport, S., “Rosalind Franklin: Unsung Hero of the DNA Revolution” in New York History, vol. 84, no. 3 (Summer, 2003), pp.315-329; Watson, J., Lecture inaugurating Harvard’s Center for Genomics Research, 30 Sept 1999.
