by Josh Forman, Head of Science, Education & Outreach
Rosalind Franklin’s story has been told many times, usually in the language of discovery, competition, sexism and deception. This story is now infamous as a key exemplar of sexism in science, and how one scientist’s work and contribution was erased from history. As always, the story is never quite as black and white as we like to think.
We have become used to the story of the weight she carried, the contradictions she lived with, and the quiet courage of a Jewish woman navigating the narrow corridors of mid-20th-century British science. But things weren’t quite as we perceive them.
She was born on 25 July 1920 in Notting Hill, London, into an Anglo-Jewish family that valued learning as a moral duty. Education, service, and responsibility were woven into the fabric of the Franklin household. Her father, a merchant banker, taught evening classes for workers and the family helped Jewish refugees fleeing the darkness consuming Europe during World War II.
From childhood, she was remarkably bright. She devoured languages, delighted in logical puzzles, and loved the order and elegance of the physical world. At Newnham College, Cambridge, which was one of the few places that admitted women, she honed those gifts and studied physical chemistry, graduating in 1941 with a clarity of purpose that belied her age.
But war has a way of interrupting even the most determined trajectory. During World War 2, she redirected her talents toward the war effort, working on the chemistry of coal and carbon and when the war ended, she turned her attention to a new frontier: the invisible architectures of matter, captured through X-ray crystallography.
At King’s College London in the early 1950s, her lab photographed something that would change the world, Photo 51, the now-legendary diffraction image revealing DNA’s helical structure. Her meticulous work showed not only that the molecule formed a double helix, but that it had two distinct forms (long and thread like, or short and fat), and that the phosphate backbone faced outward. It was an insight both elegant and elemental, the sort of thing only a mind like hers could see. The picture, produced by a pure chemist, underpinned almost everything we now know about genetics and biology.
This image, which was fundamental to the discovery of DNA’s structure is the origin of the controversy between Franklin, Watson, Crick and Wilkins. The story that we know of now, i.e. that Watson and Crick stole her work is still not completely clear. There are a lot more positives that we don’t really hear about – for example, she had a wonderful relationship with Odile Crick, Francis’ wife after the 1953 publications. From what we can see, she didn’t hold a grudge about this, or even necessarily consider her work stolen or blame Crick. Her work, including Photo 51 was published in Nature along side Crick and Watson’s seminal paper, so that there was no overt erasure of her work or name at that point.
What we do know, is that she had a very difficult time at Kings. Franklin had already arranged to leave King’s Kings when Photo 51 was produced, 2 years into her 3 year fellowship. When Kings held a celebration of the work, she didn’t attend as she’d already left to swap to Birkbeck college, and had ended her work on DNA. We also know that the darker side of the story likely comes from Franklin’s relationship between Maurice Wilkins. As colleagues at Kings, they did not get on. They clashed on a personal level, and everything was fraught between them from the outset, when Franklin was told DNA would be her responsibility, but Wilkin’s thought she was to be his assistant. It was Wilkins who showed Photo 51 to Watson without Franklin’s knowledge.
Still, she kept going. She published. She challenged assumptions. She worked alone when she had to, and with generosity when collaboration allowed it. She turned her attention to protein and nucleic acids as well as viruses at Birkbeck, and her partner, Aaron Klug went on to win a Nobel Prize in 1982 for this work.
She died far too young, on 16 April 1958, at just 37 from ovarian cancer. It has long been considered that this likely was caused by X-ray exposure, after all she was an expert X-ray crystallographer. This technique is where X-ray images are taken of crystalised molecules, and she must have absorbed a very high amount of radiation. Another, lesser known consideration is the high incidence of gynaecological cancers in her family. This suggests another possibility – that she may have carried a hereditary risk such as BRCA. The fact that she was so young, it was cancer we now know to be linked to a BRCA mutation, the increased prevalence in those of Jewish ancestry combined with her exposure to a carcinogenic form of radiation could have led to an unbeknown risk. Even in her final years, weakened and in pain, she continued to work, publish, and lead research. Today, the world is aware of how much we owe her. Not as a footnote or a cautionary tale, but as a brilliant scientist whose integrity shaped the foundations of molecular biology. And yet perhaps the most enduring part of her story is not the theft of credit, nor the politics of her workplace, but her resilience – the fierce, bright resolve of a woman who refused to step aside, who insisted on seeing clearly, and who believed that truth, once uncovered, should speak for itself.
