BIOGRAPHY

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Rosalind was born on the 25th of July 1920 to parents Ellis and Muriel Franklin. At the age of 11 she started school at one of the few girls school in London, St Paul's. From very early on Rosalind expressed an interest in Science. When she was 15, she decided to become a scientist. Her father was against higher education for women and wanted Rosalind to be a social worker but ultimately he relented because of his wife and sisters persistence and in 1938 she enrolled at Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating in 1941. At Cambridge she earned a degree in physical chemistry and in 1941 she stayed on for an extra year as a graduate.

Because of the war all scientists were working for the government to make advances. In 1942 Rosalind went to work at the British Coal Utilization Research Association, where she made fundamental studies of carbon and graphite microstructures. This work was the basis of her doctorate in physical chemistry, which she earned from Cambridge University in 1945.

Her PhD led to an offer to join the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat in Paris. She worked there, from 1947 to 1950, with Jacques Mering and became very good at applying x-ray diffraction techniques to imperfectly crystalline matter such as coal. From this work she published many papers that ultimately changed the way physical chemists view the microstructure of coals and related substances.

She was brought back to London when she came to work at kings college. She was hired by Randall to set up an x-ray crystallography unit in the lab to investigate the crystal structure of DNA. After being unhappy at King's she moved to Birbeck were she worked on TMV. She was diagnosed with Ovarian cancer in 1956 she continued her work on TMV and  also began working on the polio virus until she died in April of 1958.