Rosalind Franklin Biography Essay

Rosalind Franklin came into this world on July 25, 1920 in Notting Hill, London, into a Jewish family. She knew she would take the path of science at 15 years of age. She went to Newnham College in 1938, and earned Ph.D. in physical chemistry at Cambridge University. In 1941, Franklin earned Second class honors in the finals. She was accepted as a bachelors degree in the qualification for employment. She then went to Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l”Etat (Central Laboratory of Chemical Services of the State) in France, 1946. In France, she worked with crystallographer Jacques Mering who taught her x-ray diffraction, which played a large part in her “the secret of life” that later helped with her structure of DNA. Franklin returned to London, and began working as a research associate at King’s College in the biophysics unit. John Randall used his expertise and x-ray diffraction techniques on DNA fibers.

Her Photo 51 displays wet B, which was taken in 1951. In 1953, Maurice Wilkins, a colleague of Franklin, revealed Franklin’s Photo 51 to a competing scientist, James Watson and Francis Crick who were working on their own DNA model. This changed the course of DNA, Photo 51 helped Watson and Crick figure out the rest of the DNA structure. They then made Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids, and won the Nobel Prize for it.

She was very close to actually deciphering the DNA structure. She had the parameters of the helical backbone, and also knew the two types of DNA, dry A, as well as wet B, which was important in deciphering the DNA structure. In her notebooks, she seemed to be aware of Chargaff’s ratios, which states adenine and thymine is equal, as well as cytosine to guanine. The difference of enol and keto forms, which was key to base pairing, were well known as well as hydrogen