Sydney S's List: Rosalind Fraklin

• • need to find other source to mark, but this gives dates and names of parents
• Her father was Ellis Arthur Franklin (1894–1964), a London merchant banker and her mother was Muriel Frances Waley (1894–1976); she was the elder daughter and second of the family of five children

• to prosperous parents, Ellis and Muriel Waley Franklin. Mr. Franklin was a prominent banker and the family was active in community activities.

• Her parents were from a family of merchant bankers and believed that girls were educated to get married and then do charitable social work as adults. This was to be the cause of some friction between Rosalind and her father.
• eldest daughter of a family of five children

• there was one other person whose truly  essential contribution to this discovery could not be recognized by  the Nobel Committee in 1962. That person was Rosalind Franklin.
• Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin were  peers. Franklin had discovered that DNA could crystallize into two  different forms, an A form and a B form. John Randall gave Franklin  the A form and Wilkins the B form, assigning them each the task of  elucidating their molecular structure.
• The technique
• set out to do this is  called X-ray crystallography. With this technique a crystal is  exposed to x-rays in order to produce a diffraction pattern. If the  crystal is pure enough and the diffraction pattern is acquired very  carefully, it is possible to reconstruct the positions of the atoms  in the molecules that comprise the basic unit of the crystal called  the unit cell
• Franklin also succeeded in developing an ingenious and laborious  method to separate the two forms, providing the first DNA crystals  pure enough to yield interpretable diffraction patterns

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• London, England, July 25, 1920
• London, England, April 16, 1958
• Franklin was  responsible for much of the research and discovery work that led  to the understanding of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid,  DNA.
• from ovarian cancer.
• death at age 37
• attended one of the few girls'  schools in London that taught physics and chemistry. When she  was 15, she decided to become a scientist.
• in 1938 she enrolled  at Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating in 1941
• graduate fellowship for a year, but quit in 1942
• she made  fundamental studies of carbon and graphite microstructures. This  work was the basis of her doctorate in physical chemistry, which  she earned from Cambridge University in 1945.
• After Cambridge, she spent three productive years (1947-1950) in Paris   at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de L'Etat, where she   learned X-ray diffraction techniques. In 1951, she returned to England   as a research associate in John Randall's laboratory at King's College,   London.
• She also began work on the polio virus. In the summer of 1956,  Rosalind Franklin became ill with cancer. She died less than two  years later.

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