The one biography which never ceases to fascinate me is the story of Rosalind Elsie Franklin. The Dark lady; The First Lady; The Unsung Hero of DNA are the few names you will hear from the people when referring to the contribution of R. Franklin for unraveling the structure of human DNA. In a letter to her father Ellis Franklin in 1940, she wrote, “Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science gives me a partial explanation of life.” That was the extent of belief and love she had for science.

Being physicist by profession, she was born on July 25, 1920, in an Anglo-Jewish family residing in London. Her father was one of the three partners at Keyser’s Bank. She attended St. Paul’s Girls School and her family vacations often included hiking, which later turned out to be her passion along with foreign traveling. Eventually, she became a brilliant physicist and worked for the British government on studying the nature of different coals by using x-ray crystallography. After which she went to France to master her skills in x-ray diffraction and became very proficient in it. Though she was very happy in France, she decided to return to England. In 1950, she received a 3-year Turner and Newall Fellowship in J. T. Randall’s Biophysics Unit at King’s College in London.

Randall’s original plan was to build the crystallography section with the help of Rosalind for analyzing proteins. After the suggestion of M. Wilkins, then assistant lab chief; he asked her to investigate DNA instead. Wilkins at the time expected that he and Franklin will work together, however, Randall did not convey this to her. Rather, she thought to work with a graduate student R. Gosling on DNA. This misunderstanding with M. Wilkins and probably less collegial culture at King’s college is thought to deteriorate her relation with M. Wilkins.

Franklin being brilliant physicist took increasingly clear x-ray diffraction patterns of DNA with the assistance of Gosling. Likely due to her differences, she felt possessive about her results and was against the idea for sharing her data with Wilkins for its analysis. She wanted to solve it on her own or with Gosling. Even today, it is very difficult to determine the 3-dimensional structure of biomolecules from their x-ray diffraction pattern by using computers and special softwares. Despite the unavailability of the advanced devices and other difficulties, she was well advancing in her analysis. She reported that the symmetry of unit cells in DNA fibres is of the type ‘face-centered monoclinic’ in one of her formal scientific report for a reviewing committee. M. Perutz was one of the members of this committee and was also a superior of Watson and Crick.

Shortly, Rosalind discovered that for the two forms of DNA i.e. wet (photo 51) and dry x-ray diffraction pictures varied widely. She realized that the wet form was probably helical in structure with the phosphates on the outside of ribose chain, whereas, the diffraction pattern of dry forms failed to indicate a helical structure. It took over a year for her to resolve the differences and it was the year 1953 when she concluded that both forms have two helices. Meanwhile, the race to solve the great puzzle of the fingerprint of life; the DNA has already begun as Watson and Crick were working on the theoretical model of DNA at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge.

In late January 1953, she finally agreed that Gosling can share the data of DNA diffraction pattern with Wilkins. Soon, thereafter, when Watson visited Wilkins, he shared the data with Watson. Watson was amazed and stunned by the quality of the image and had a long discussion with Wilkins for possible interpretation.

Within a few days, Watson and Crick started building the model of DNA but were unsuccessful due to several unknown parameters. This was the moment when Perutz shared Rosalind’s data of DNA fibres to Watson and Crick which immediately made them realize that this symmetry indicates two anti-parallel DNA strands. Along with this information and E. Chargaff’s observation of DNA that adenines to thymines and Guanines to Cytosines are equal, they tried to rebuild their model but again failed. It was J. Donohue; a former student of L. Pauling who suggested them that, adenines should only base with thymines and guanines to cytosines. This helped Watson to complete the whole model of DNA in just four weeks after Watson first saw Franklin’s unpublished x-ray data. Finally, the race to solve the DNA structure was won by Watson and Crick.

In the same year, three consecutive papers were published in Nature journal which announced the beginning of a new era in biology by unveiling an ingenious model of DNA structure. One was from Watson and Crick which proposed that DNA forms a right-handed helical structure having two anti-parallel strands. These were held together by specific hydrogen bonds between adenines to thymines and between guanines to cytosines. This led to the born of complementarity notion suggesting a mechanism for copying genetic information over generations in organisms. The other papers included x-ray data of DNA from Wilkins and Rosalind respectively. However, it was Rosalind’s paper which showed high-quality x-ray diffractograms indicating information which Watson and Crick needed to propose their famous DNA model.

Today majority of the biologist will agree that the most essential scientific discovery of the 20th century was unveiling of the DNA structure in 1953. And for many biology students, Watson and Crick is the hero who put all the scattered pieces of the great puzzle together and solved one of the most prized questions of that time by making the DNA model. Sadly, in 1957 at the age of 37, Rosalind Franklin died due to ovarian cancer which is believed by many was due to the exposure of x-rays.

Along with Watson and Crick, Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize for this feat in 1962. Watson and Crick in their memorable paper which was published in Nature never acknowledged Rosalind’s work and stated that their model was devised without knowing the details but only the principal findings of her unpublished work. In the end, the couple of questions which remains in the mind of many is that how much more time Watson and Crick would have taken to solve this great puzzle if Franklin’s work on DNA would not have been leaked to them? Or who would then have discovered the mysteries of DNA?

In the counterpart, while considering Rosalind Franklin’s contribution to solving the DNA, few things which bothers me is that, was she really a belligerent lady who never wanted to collaborate with Wilkins? Or she never recognized just because she was an outsider to the men’s world or antisocial? Or even feminist? Or probably a brilliant researcher with an incredible fascination for science who never cared about any recognition and continued her work even after getting diagnosed with cancer?

For Further Reading

Kary Mullis an Untamed Genius and the Invent of PCR