Dr Megan Holman with the display table.
Rosalind Franklin was a chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely unrecognised during her life.
Cambridge education
Rosalind graduated with a degree in natural sciences from Newnham College in 1941, and then enrolled for a PhD with Professor Norrish, who later won the Nobel prize. Norrish was the 1920 Chair of Physical Chemistry (a post now held by Tuomas Knowles), but he turned out to be difficult to work with, so Rosalind resigned after a year. Instead she took a research position with the British Coal Utilisation Research Association in 1942.
Overlooked
After earning her PhD in 1945, Rosalind worked in France and became an accomplished and famous X-ray crystallographer. As a research associate at King’s College, London she began working on DNA, and made many key discoveries that helped unravel its mysteries. Perhaps she is best known for ‘Photo 51’, taken by her student Raymond Gosling, which led to the discovery of the DNA double helix, for which Crick, Watson and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in 1962. Rosalind was controversially not recognised for her role in this discovery until many years later.
Photo 51, thesis and other items
The exhibition includes the first published appearance of Photo 51, which is in the same volume as Watson and Crick’s breakthrough paper on the structure of nucleic acids. It also has QR codes and links for accessing Franklin’s papers, guidance on accessing theses (including Franklin’s), books celebrating women in science, and flyers for ‘Sex and the City’ walking tours, which focus on the women of Cambridge, including several wives of Henry VIII and Rosalind Franklin.