Rosalind Franklin Essay

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Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born into a Jewish background on July 25, 1920 in Notting Hill, London, England. Her father was Ellis Arthur Franklin, a banker who taught at the city’s Working Men’s College; Rosalind’s mother was Maria Francis Waley. As a young girl, she was an intelligent child and student. Rosalind was the second oldest child of the five children in her family. David was her older brother; Colin, Roland, and Jenifer were her younger siblings. When she was six years old, she went to school with her brother Roland, at a private school called Noland Place School. When she turned eleven years old, Rosalind moved to St. Paul’s Girls’ School, which was one of the only schools that specialized in teaching girls physics and chemistry. …show more content…

Here, John used Rosalind’s experience with X-rays on DNA fibers. Using the X-ray diffraction techniques she learned from Jacques Mering, Rosalind along with her student, Raymond Gosling, discovered something that would change the world of genetics forever: the structure of DNA. Not only did Rosalind and Raymond find the structure of DNA, but they figured out that there were two types of DNA structures: a dry and a wet form. Even though Rosalind and Raymond were the true founders of the DNA structure, they were never truly given credit on this matter. What caused this was Rosalind’s conflict with her colleague, Maurice Wilkins. This conflict would cost Rosalind quite a lot in the determination of DNA’s structure. In 1953, Wilkins did a deed that would change the history of DNA’s structure discovery forever. Without Rosalind nor Raymond’s consent, she showed the picture of the wet form of DNA taken by Rosalind and her student to James Watson and Francis Crick, who were both also in the race of finding the structure of DNA.3 Later in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published what they saw in Rosalind's image of DNA, titled Photo 51. This led to their winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1962.2 Although Rosalind wasn't credited greatly by James and Francis when they published the image of DNA’s structure, overall, her findings have helped the world

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