Before DNA, Rosalind Franklin made her name studying the holes in coal
In 1945, looking for work after the war, Rosalind Franklin described herself as a physical chemist with a poor grasp of physical chemistry but an expert's knowledge of the holes in coal. That self-mocking line undersold her: the coal research had already earned her a Cambridge doctorate and changed how coals were classified.
The coal work began almost by accident. A Newnham fellowship had placed her in the Cambridge laboratory of Ronald Norrish, and after an unhappy year there she left in 1942, meeting her wartime national service obligation at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association near Kingston upon Thames. Using helium to measure density, she worked out how the tiny constrictions in coal's pores governed its permeability, and how heating drove substances out in order of molecular size. Between shifts she patrolled London streets as an air raid warden.
A contact, Adrienne Weill, introduced her to a French research director in 1946, and in 1947 she moved to Paris to work under Jacques Mering. He specialised in aiming X-rays at messy, non-crystalline materials such as rayon, and taught her how to get usable diffraction patterns from them. That skill took her in January 1951 to the Medical Research Council unit at King's College London, where John Randall steered her toward DNA.
There her student Raymond Gosling took the X-ray image known as Photo 51. Maurice Wilkins showed it to James Watson without her permission, and it fed into the double helix model for which Watson, Francis Crick and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She later moved to Birkbeck, where her team, working under John Desmond Bernal, tackled the structures of viruses.
Born in Notting Hill on 25 July 1920, she was the second of five children in a prosperous Jewish banking family that took in refugee children fleeing the Nazis. An aunt called her alarmingly clever, doing sums for fun; at school she shone at everything except music, prompting Gustav Holst to ask her mother about her hearing. She died of ovarian cancer on 16 April 1958, aged 37, the day before she was due to present the tobacco mosaic virus structure in Brussels. Her colleague Aaron Klug carried the work on and won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Source: Rosalind Franklin
