Rosalind Franklin (1920/07/25-1958/04/16), a major pioneer of molecular structural biology

Rosalind Franklin, born July 25th 1920, exactly 100 years ago, was a major pioneer of molecular structural biology, which started in 1953 with the discovery of the double‐helical nature of DNA, crucially based on unacknowledged experimental data from her and Raymond Gosling, a PhD student at King's College working under her supervision.

Rosalind Franklin was a talented experimentalist, and her skills in X-ray crystallography on DNA fibers opened the way to the discovery of the DNA double helix, even though she did not get proper credit - see Brenda Maddox' article in Nature in 2003 : https://www.nature.com/articles/nature01399.pdf.

I was lucky enough to attend the "50th Anniversary of the Double Helix" Conference organized by the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and The Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in April 2003. The late Sir Aaron Klug gave a remarkable scientific account of this seminal discovery, including Rosalind Franklin's paramount experimental contribution. As last speaker, Jim Watson failed to recognize Rosalind Franklin's contribution - he did not even mention her name, missing a historical opportunity to do her justice. This was just very sad.

Beyond that, Nature's Editorial this week (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02144-4) reminds us that she was much more than that : she was a passionate and brilliant scientist with wide-ranging interests from coal to viruses. I remember reading with great excitement 15 years ago her biography by Brenda Maddox "Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA" (https://www.harpercollins.com/products/rosalind-franklin-brenda-maddox).

#RosalindFranklin #womeninscience #crystallography #DNA #structuralbiology

(Photo credit: Vittorio Luzzati)