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Journal Club Meeting-II

10th May 2022

Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA

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Discovery of DNA

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1962, "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material"

Francis Crick

James Watson

Maurice Wilkins

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DNA: Deoxy ribonucleic acid

Science Museum Group Collection

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The Controversary

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Rosalind Elsie Franklin

1920: Born on 25th July in Notting Hill, London, to Ellis Arthur Franklin and Muriel Frances Waley

1938- Passed high school from the St. Paul’s Girls’ School, Hammersmith, London, with six distinctions

1941- Graduated with B.S. (Physical Chemistry) from Newnham College of Cambridge University,

1941-1945: Worked at the British Coal Utilization Research Association (BCURA) for her Ph.D. thesis

  • One of the few women scientists employed by BCURA
  • Her way of contributing to the war effort, as coal was utilized in gas masks for its highly adsorptive nature
  • Made important observations into the porosity and density of coal, and her papers are even cited today.

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Rosalind Elsie Franklin

Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l’Etat in Paris

  • Jacques Mering’s lab, pioneer in X-ray diffraction, technique that measures the diffraction angles and intensities of X-rays to estimate the molecular structure of a crystal
  • Rosalind applied X-ray diffraction to study the fine structure of coal, leading to her most important contribution to carbon research — distinguishing between graphitizing and non-graphitizing types of Carbon, based on the difference in arrangement of carbon molecules within the material

1951: King’s College London

  • Foray into biological chemistry as she was starting work on the nucleic acid DNA
  • Unpleasant start, as there was some confusion over who would lead the x-ray crystallography research, she or Maurice Wilkins
  • Working with her graduate student Raymond Gosling, and together they generated an x-ray diffraction image of DNA, known as ‘Photo 51’

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https://thebumblingbiochemist.com/365-days-of-science/rosalind-franklin-and-photo-51/

B-form: Photo 51, blurry X that unlocked the structure of DNA

Rosalind Elsie Franklin

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Rosalind’s lab notebook where she discovers the double helix structure of DNA. (Image source: FRKN/1/4 — Reports and Working Notes on DNA. Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0))

Rosalind Elsie Franklin

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Rosalind Elsie Franklin

1953: Joined physicist and crystallographer J.D. Bernal Crystallography Laboratory at Birkbeck College,

  • worked on the RNA virus, Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV), and also the turnip yellow mosaic virus, and poliovirus
  • demonstrated that the RNA is embedded inside the protein coat of TMV

1956: Diagnosed with ovarian cancer

Her last two years were spent in surgery, treatment and convalescence with friends and family

She kept working till the very end, trying to get grants for her research group and publishing seven papers in 1957. She passed away on April 16,1958 at the young age of 37.

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2002: Biography “Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA” by Brenda Maddox

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Dr. Howard Markel, director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan

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We all know the scene — James Watson and Francis Crick, discoverers of the DNA double helix, walk into a pub in Cambridge and declare, “We have discovered the secret of life!” The rest is Nobel Prize history.

Except, “[t]he most famous scientific announcement of the twentieth century was not made in precisely the way most of us were taught in high school,”

In his new book, “The Secret of Life: Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, Francis Crick, and the Discovery of DNA’s Double Helix,” Markel tells the far more complicated tale, and what he calls one of the most egregious rip-offs in the history of science.

“If life was fair, which it’s not, it would be called the Watson-Crick-Franklin model,”

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Science Community

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/meet-rosalind-franklin-a-sidelined-figure-in-the-history-of-dna-science

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Did Watson and Crick deny Franklin her share of the credit on purpose, either out of sexism or simple cutthroat competitiveness?

History hasn't produced a consensus on that point.

Franklin herself, in response to Watson and Crick's paper, said only, "We all stand on each other's shoulders.“

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In fact, if not for Franklin's early death, she might eventually have had two Nobel Prizes. At the time of her death, she was working on the molecular structure of viruses with her colleague Aaron Klug, who received a Nobel Prize for the work in 1982.

Science Community

“distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook. Her photographs are among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken.”- Obituary by John D. Bernal.

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On Jan. 27, 2004, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science became the first medical institution in the United States to recognize a female scientist through an honorary namesake. Then President and CEO Dr. K. Michael Welch hailed Dr. Franklin as “a role model for our students, researchers, faculty and all aspiring scientists throughout the world.” He declared Photo 51 as the university’s logo and declared “Life in Discovery” as its motto.

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