journal
of science education
Rosalind Franklin: The Woman Scientist of DNA
It is fifty years since Watson and Crick first proposed the structure of DNA in their paper in Nature in 1953. The same issue also carried the papers by Wilkins, Stokes and Wilson and by Franklin and Gosling. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Watson, Crick and Wilkins. Rosalind Franklin had died at the young age of 37 in 1958 of cancer. She was never awarded the Nobel Prize as it is not given posthumously. But it was Franklin’s unpublished measurements of the crucial distances in the DNA molecule, provided by her colleague Wilkins, without her knowledge, to Watson and Crick, that enabled them to build a model of DNA. This fact came to light nearly ten years after the award of the Nobel Prize. In their Nobel Prize lecture neither Watson nor Crick thanked Franklin for making their discovery possible. To this day, Watson emphasizes the opinion that Rosalind, although a gifted experimentalist, could not properly interpret all of her own DNA data. However, the meticulous studies of the brilliant scientist, as Rosalind was described by her biographers, has led Lynne Alkine, Professor at California State University, to suggest that a meaningful gesture, given that it was Franklin’s data that the Watson and Crick most directly used, would be for scientists to refer to the “Watson, Crick and Franklin Structure of DNA”.
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