by THERESA ESQUERRA
“Rosalind Franklin was a British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer who made critical contributions to the understanding of the fine molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal and graphite.” SOURCE/Wikipedia
I first heard of Rosalind Franklin during my freshmen year of studies at Harvard College. I was taking the core course “Science and Society in the 20th-Century” and we had been assigned to read James Watson’s memoir The Double Helix. I recall sitting in a section meeting and my teaching fellow noting how now we knew more about Rosalind Franklin’s role in the discovery of the structure of DNA. Franklin was the female British scientist whose unpublished experimental data obtained from x-ray diffraction techniques provided much of the foundational information needed to solve the structure of DNA. However, she did not receive joint authorship or adequate credit for her contributions to the discovery while she was alive. I remember thinking this sounded like an intriguing story and something I’d like to learn more about someday.
Huffington Post for more
(Thanks to Sultan Pesnani)