What problems did Rosalind Franklin overcome?
In March 1953, Maurice Wilkins of King’s College, London, announced the departure of his obstructive colleague Rosalind Franklin to rival Cavendish Laboratory scientist Francis Crick. But it was too late. Franklin’s unpublished data and crucial photograph of DNA had already been seen by her competitors at the Cambridge University lab. With the aid of these, plus their own knowledge, Watson and Crick discovered the structure of the molecule that genes are composed of — DNA, the secret of life. Five years later, at the age of thirty-seven, after more brilliant research under J. D. Bernal at Birkbeck College, Rosalind died of ovarian cancer. Rosalind Franklin’s research was central to the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure. Known only as the bossy, unfeminine “Rosy” in James Watson’s The Double Helix, Franklin never received the credit she was due during her lifetime. And the BEST link… h
