Skip to content
Rethink Society

Biography · Noble People · 81 / 100

Rosalind Franklin

1920–1958 · Chemist and X-ray crystallographer

Portrait of Rosalind Franklin
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology · Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Bio

British chemist whose X-ray diffraction images of DNA at King's College London, notably Photograph 51, provided critical evidence for the double-helix structure. Her data was shown to Watson and Crick without her knowledge. She also produced important work on the structures of viruses, coal and graphite. She died of ovarian cancer at 37, before the Nobel Prize was awarded for DNA.