Rosalind Franklin

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Rosalind Franklin died on the 16th of April 1958, at age 37, one day before the world's fair in Brussels opened its doors to reveal a five-foot model of a virus she had built from table tennis balls and plastic bicycle handlebar grips. She never saw the exhibit. She had spent her final months working through chemotherapy, producing papers, directing a research group, and applying for new grants, while ovarian cancer took hold of her. The Brussels fair had been designed as the first major international showcase since World War II, and Franklin's model stood in the International Science Pavilion as evidence of her last great project. But her name is almost never attached to that work. It is attached, instead, to a photograph she did not take, credited to a discovery she did not receive credit for, and to a Nobel Prize that was awarded four years after she died to three men who used her data.

  This documentary asks how that happened. It asks what she actually did, what she actually knew, and how the story of Photo 51 became so much louder than the rest of her life.

• 2. A Family Built for Argument

  ›

  At 50 Chepstow Villas in Notting Hill, London, on the 25th of July 1920, Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born into a family whose members argued about everything, from politics to God, and expected her to hold her own. Her father, Ellis Arthur Franklin, was a liberal merchant banker who taught electricity, magnetism, and the history of the Great War at the Working Men's College in the evenings. Her paternal great-uncle Herbert Samuel served as Home Secretary in 1916 and was the first practising Jew to sit in the British Cabinet. Her aunt Helen, known in the family as Mamie, was active in trade union organisation and the women's suffrage movement and later sat on the London County Council. Her uncle Hugh Franklin was also prominent in the suffrage movement, though his actions there embarrassed the wider family.

  The Franklin household was not merely civic-minded in the abstract. Franklin's parents sheltered Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe, including a nine-year-old Austrian child named Evi Eisenstädter, who shared a room with Rosalind's younger sister Jenifer. The middle name "Elsie" that Rosalind carried was given in memory of Hugh Franklin's first wife, who died in the 1918 flu pandemic. There was a weight of history in these names.

  Franklin's aunt Mamie described her niece at age six as "alarmingly clever", noting that she spent her time doing arithmetic for pleasure and always got her sums right. At age eleven, Franklin entered St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, one of the few schools in London that taught both physics and chemistry to girls. The school music director was the composer Gustav Holst, who once contacted her mother to ask whether Rosalind might have a hearing problem, because music was her only educational weakness. She topped her classes in everything else, won annual prizes, and passed her matriculation in 1938 with six distinctions, earning a scholarship worth £30 a year for three years. Her father asked her to give that scholarship money to a deserving refugee student instead.

• 3. Coal, Carbon, and Paris

  ›

  Franklin enrolled at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1938 and studied chemistry within the Natural Sciences Tripos. She received second-class honours in 1941, which was accepted as a bachelor's degree at the time. Cambridge would not formally award degrees to women until 1947, when it began granting titular BA and MA degrees retroactively to previous graduates.

  Her supervisor at the physical chemistry laboratory, Ronald George Wreyford Norrish, who would later win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, was by his own biographer's account obstinate, overbearing, and at the time succumbing to heavy drinking. He could not settle on an assignment of work for her. Franklin wrote that he made her despise him completely. She resigned. She fulfilled her obligations under the National Service Acts by taking a post as assistant research officer at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, known as BCURA, in 1942. The association was situated on the Coombe Springs Estate near Kingston upon Thames.

  At BCURA, Franklin studied the porosity of coal using helium to measure its density. She discovered the relationship between fine constrictions in coal pores and the permeability of porous space, and concluded that substances were expelled in order of molecular size as temperature increased. This work let scientists classify coals and predict their performance for both fuel and the production of wartime equipment including gas masks. It became the basis of her PhD thesis and several published papers. Cambridge awarded her the doctorate in 1945.

  With the war ending, Franklin wrote to her friend Adrienne Weill looking for openings for, as she put it, "a physical chemist who knows very little physical chemistry, but quite a lot about the holes in coal." Weill introduced her at an autumn 1946 conference to Marcel Mathieu, a director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique. This led to her appointment under Jacques Mering at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'État in Paris. She joined on the 14th of February 1947 as one of the fifteen chercheurs on staff.

  Mering was an X-ray crystallographer who had applied X-ray diffraction to amorphous substances like rayon, a domain almost entirely unexplored at the time. He taught Franklin the practical methods for working with substances that lacked the regular crystal structure the technique had traditionally required. She extended her coal work to carbonaceous materials more broadly, studying changes in atomic arrangement as these substances converted to graphite. She coined the terms graphitising and non-graphitising carbon, terms that entered the mainstream physics and chemistry of coal and carbon and were later covered in a 1993 monograph and in the regularly published textbook Chemistry and Physics of Carbon. Franklin also began to build a real facility with French as a working language. She had studied it at school, but Paris made her fluent.

• 4. King's College and the Two Forms of DNA

  ›

  In 1950, Franklin received a three-year Turner and Newall Fellowship to work at King's College London. She arrived in January 1951 as a research associate in the Medical Research Council's Biophysics Unit, directed by John Randall. She had been hired to study proteins and lipids by X-ray diffraction, but Randall redirected her to DNA fibres before she even started, because a researcher named Maurice Wilkins had already begun pioneering diffraction work on DNA. Randall had also reassigned Wilkins's graduate student, Raymond Gosling, to be Franklin's assistant. He did this without fully informing Wilkins, who was on holiday when the letter went to Franklin in December 1950, reassuring her that "as far as the experimental X-ray effort there would be for the moment only yourself and Gosling."

  Wilkins returned to find his work reorganised around him. The friction that followed has been extensively documented. Franklin was concise, direct, and held people's gaze when she spoke. Wilkins was shy, slow to speak, and avoided eye contact. When she answered one of his questions about her humidity-controlling camera technique, he felt she had addressed him with "an air of cool superiority". The camera itself was a significant technical achievement. Franklin built a chamber that controlled humidity using different saturated salt solutions, refining and adjusting the fine-focus X-ray tube and microcamera that Wilkins had ordered. With it, she could produce higher-quality X-ray images than those Wilkins had taken.

  Almost immediately, Franklin discovered that DNA existed in two distinct forms. At a relative humidity above 75%, the DNA fibre became long and thin. Drier, it became short and fat. She called the first form "wet" and the second "crystalline", later renaming them B and A respectively. Her first notebook entry on the crystalline form reads: "Evidence for spiral structure. Straight chain untwisted is highly improbable. Absence of reflections on meridian in crystalline form suggests spiral structure." She also identified that the phosphate group lay outside the main DNA chain. At a seminar in November 1951, she presented her findings to an audience that included James Watson, specifying the molecule's two forms, its water content, and the external position of the phosphate units.

  Watson, at the time without a strong grasp of the chemistry, did not take notes. When he and Francis Crick at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge used these parameters to build a model, they placed the phosphate backbone in the centre. Franklin visited Cambridge and immediately pointed out the error, noting that the strong hydrophilic character of the phosphate groups meant they had to be on the outside. The model collapsed.

  By the end of 1951, the B form of DNA was generally accepted at King's as a helix. Franklin's analysis of the A form was more ambiguous. When she recorded an asymmetrical image in May 1952, she became unconvinced that A-DNA was helical. In July 1952, she and Gosling produced a mock funeral notice for helical A-DNA, addressed to Wilkins, mourning the death of "DNA helix (crystalline)" and noting that "a memorial service will be held next Monday or Tuesday" and that "it is hoped that Dr M H F Wilkins will speak in memory of the late helix." They signed it formally: "Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling."

  By January 1953, Franklin had resolved her conflicting data. She concluded that both DNA forms had two helices and had begun drafting three manuscripts. Her two A-DNA papers reached Acta Crystallographica in Copenhagen on the 6th of March 1953, the day before Crick and Watson completed their model. She had written them without knowledge of the Cambridge work in progress.

• 5. Photo 51 and the Race to the Model

  ›

  Photo 51 was taken not by Franklin but by her student Raymond Gosling, at her direction, during their work together on B-DNA. John Desmond Bernal, the physicist and crystallographer, later called the X-ray diffraction images produced by Franklin and Gosling "amongst the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken."

  On the 30th of January 1953, Watson travelled from Cambridge to King's carrying a preprint of Linus Pauling's incorrect proposal for the structure of DNA. Wilkins was not in his office. Watson went to Franklin's laboratory instead to argue that all parties should collaborate before Pauling found his error. Franklin, unimpressed, grew angry when Watson suggested she did not know how to interpret her own X-ray data. Watson retreated into the corridor, where he ran into Wilkins. Wilkins, commiserating with Watson, showed him Franklin's X-ray image of B-DNA. Franklin was not consulted.

  In mid-February 1953, Crick received a copy of an MRC biophysics committee report on King's work, written in December 1952, from his thesis supervisor Max Perutz. The report contained Franklin and Gosling's crystallographic calculations, including the 34 Angstrom repeat distance for DNA and the C2 symmetry of the structure. This immediately told Crick that the molecule had to contain equal numbers of parallel and anti-parallel strands running in opposite directions. Perutz later said he saw no harm in sharing the report, since it had not been marked confidential, though "the report was not expected to reach outside eyes". After Watson's The Double Helix exposed this, Perutz received enough critical letters that he felt the need to post a public statement in Science defending himself on the grounds of being "inexperienced and casual in administrative matters."

  Watson and Crick finished their model on the 7th of March 1953. A day later, they received a letter from Wilkins saying Franklin was finally leaving King's and they could put "all hands to the pump". Crick and Watson published in Nature on the 25th of April 1953, acknowledging only in a footnote that they had "been stimulated by a general knowledge of Franklin and Wilkins' 'unpublished' contribution."

  Franklin's own B-DNA manuscript, dated the 17th of March 1953, was found years later among her papers by Aaron Klug. When Klug first examined her documents after her death, he initially believed she had not been convinced of the double-helical nature of B-DNA until she learned of the Cambridge model. Scrutiny of her notebooks changed that assessment. Her notes from February 1953 include: "Evidence for 2-chain (or 1-chain helix)." A subsequent entry reads: "Structure B does not fit single helical theory, even for low layer-lines." She had arrived at the double helix independently, though she had not yet worked out the complementarity of base pairing that was Crick and Watson's key biological insight.

  On the 10th of April 1953, Franklin wrote to Crick requesting permission to see their model. After viewing it, she reportedly asked, "It's very pretty, but how are they going to prove it?" Most of the scientific community withheld acceptance of the double-helix proposal for several more years; mainly geneticists embraced it early, because of its obvious implications for heredity.

• 6. Birkbeck and the Virus Work

  ›

  Franklin left King's for Birkbeck College in mid-March 1953, describing the move in a letter to Adrienne Weill in Paris as going "from a palace to the slums... but pleasanter all the same." She had been recruited by physics department chair John Desmond Bernal, who was known for promoting female crystallographers. Her new laboratories were housed in 21 Torrington Square, a cramped Georgian building shared by several departments. Franklin frequently challenged Bernal about the careless attitudes of other laboratory staff, including one occasion when workers in the Pharmacy department flooded her first-floor laboratory.

  Although Bernal told her to set aside nucleic acid work, Franklin helped Gosling complete his thesis. Together they published the first evidence of the double helix in the A form of DNA in the 25th of July issue of Nature, the same journal that had carried the Watson-Crick model.

  Franklin's primary focus at Birkbeck became the structure of viruses, using the same X-ray crystallography she had applied to coal and DNA. She concentrated especially on the tobacco mosaic virus, known as TMV, an RNA virus. Her collaboration with Aaron Klug began in early 1954. Klug had recently earned his PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge, and had joined Birkbeck in late 1953. In 1955, Franklin published her first major works on TMV in Nature, arguing that all TMV particles were the same length. This directly contradicted the view of the eminent virologist Norman Pirie, though Franklin's observation proved correct.

  At the end of 1954, Bernal secured Agricultural Research Council funding that allowed Franklin to operate as a senior scientist supervising her own group. John Finch joined from King's College London, followed by Kenneth Holmes, a Cambridge graduate, in July 1955. From 1956, Franklin's team published work on TMV, cucumber virus 4, and turnip yellow mosaic virus. Franklin assigned the complete structure of TMV to Holmes as his PhD project. They published in 1956 that the virus coating consisted of protein molecules arranged in helices. An American post-doctoral student, Donald Caspar, joined in 1955 and worked on the precise location of RNA molecules in TMV. The following year, Caspar and Franklin published complementary papers in the 10th of March issue of Nature showing that the RNA in TMV runs along the inner surface of the hollow virus. Caspar was not a fluent writer, and Franklin wrote the entire manuscript for him.

  In 1956, colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, proposed that Franklin's group take on the structure of the polio virus. She applied the following year to the United States Public Health Service of the National Institutes of Health, which approved £10,000 for three years, the largest grant ever received at Birkbeck. She arranged for the live virus to be stored safely at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine during the work. Franklin's group began deciphering the structure of the polio virus in its crystalline state, but she was forced to stop as her health failed. After her death, Klug, Finch, and Holmes continued the work. In June 1959, Klug and Finch published findings showing the polio virus had icosahedral symmetry, and suggested the possibility that all spherical viruses share the same structure, permitting the maximum possible number of identical structural units.

• 7. Legacy and the Nobel Question

  ›

  Franklin was never nominated for a Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded in 1962 to Crick, Watson, and Wilkins, and the Nobel rules in effect until 1974 prohibited posthumous awards unless the nomination had been submitted before the 1st of February of the award year and the nominee was still alive at the time. Franklin had died in 1958.

  The timeline mattered. General acceptance for the double helix and its biological function did not solidify until the late 1950s. The first decisive experimental confirmation came from Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl in 1958, who showed how DNA replication works in Escherichia coli. Nobel nominations for the DNA structure work followed in 1960, 1961, and 1962. By then, Wilkins had spent more than a decade refining and confirming the Watson-Crick model. Watson had worked on RNA. Crick had been working on the genetic code. The prize was awarded for their overall body of work on nucleic acids, not solely for the 1953 model.

  James Watson has since said that ideally Wilkins and Franklin would have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Linus Pauling, who received the Nobel Peace Prize that same year, had actually warned the Nobel Committee in 1960 that it might be premature to make an award to Watson and Crick given uncertainties about the detailed structure of nucleic acids. Pauling was not entirely wrong: an alternative to Watson-Crick base pairing, called Hoogsteen base pairing, was discovered by Karst Hoogsteen in 1963.

  Aaron Klug, Franklin's colleague and the principal beneficiary of her will, who received £3,000 and her Austin car, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982 for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural analysis of nucleic acid-protein complexes. The citation describes work that Franklin had initiated and introduced to Klug.

  In 2023, an unpublished article prepared for Time magazine in 1953 was found among Franklin's papers. The article, written by journalist Joan Bruce in consultation with Franklin, described the DNA discovery as the outcome of a joint effort, with the two teams linking up and "confirming each other's work from time to time, or wrestling over a common problem." Science historians Nathaniel Comfort of Johns Hopkins University and Matthew Cobb of the University of Manchester, reporting in Nature, concluded that Franklin was an equal player in the process leading to the discovery, not a victim of it. Another document found at the same time, a letter from Pauline Cowan at King's College inviting Crick to attend Franklin's lecture in January 1953, showed that Crick was already familiar with the available DNA data before the critical period in which the model was built.

  The inscription on Franklin's tombstone at Willesden United Synagogue Cemetery reads, in part: "Scientist. Her research and discoveries on viruses remain of lasting benefit to mankind." Finch University of Health Sciences in North Chicago renamed itself the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in 2004 and adopted Photo 51 as its logo. That the university chose the X-ray image, rather than the virus model she died building, may be the most telling measure of how her story has been framed.