Rosalind Franklin Tribute

Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin is sometimes called the "Dark Lady of DNA." Her work with x-ray crystallography was crucial to the discovery of the double helix, but Watson and Crick tend to get most of the credit. While Franklin's partner, Maurice Wilkins, shared a Nobel Prize with James Watson and Fancis Crick, Franklin had died by that point. As Nobel Prizes are not given posthumously, she was left out of the award.

Franklin inspires women scientists for her success in the field at a time when the sciences were even more male-dominated than they are today. Her research on DNA aided Watson and Crick in developing their model, which paved the way for scientists to understand what genes are and how they are inherited at the chemical level.

RNA research:
Franklin continued to explore another major nucleic acid, RNA, a molecule equally central to life as DNA. She again used X-ray crystallography to study the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), an RNA virus. Her meeting with Aaron Klug in early 1954 led to a longstanding and successful collaboration. Klug had just then earned his PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge, and joined Birkbeck in late 1953. In 1955 Franklin published her first major works on TMV in Nature, in which she described that all TMV virus particles were of the same length. This was in direct contradiction to the ideas of the eminent virologist Norman Pirie, though her observation ultimately proved correct.

Franklin assigned the study of the complete structure of TMV to her PhD student Holmes. They soon discovered (published in 1956) that the covering of TMV was protein molecules arranged in helices. Her colleague Klug worked on spherical viruses with his student Finch, with Franklin coordinating and overseeing the work. As a team, from 1956 they started publishing seminal works on TMV, cucumber virus 4 and turnip yellow mosaic virus.

Franklin also had a research assistant, James Watt, subsidised by the National Coal Board and was now the leader of the ARC group at Birkbeck. The Birkbeck team members continued working on RNA viruses affecting several plants, including potato, turnip, tomato and pea. In 1955 the team was joined by an American post-doctoral student Donald Caspar. He worked on the precise location of RNA molecules in TMV. In 1956 he and Franklin published individual but complementary papers in the 10 March issue of Nature, in which they showed that the RNA in TMV is wound along the inner surface of the hollow virus. Caspar was not an enthusiastic writer, and Franklin had to write the entire manuscript for him. In 1957 her research grant from ARC expired, and was given a one-year extension ending in March 1958.

Expo 58, the first major international fair after World War II, was to be held in Brussels in 1958. Franklin was invited to make a five-foot high model of TMV, which she started in 1957. Her materials included table tennis balls and plastic bicycle handlebar grips.[118] The Brussels world's fair, with an exhibit of her virus model at the International Science Pavilion, opened on 17 April, one day after she died.

Polio virus:
In 1956, Franklin visited the University of California, Berkeley, where colleagues had suggested her group research the polio virus. In 1957 she applied for a grant from the United States Public Health Service of the National Institutes of Health, which approved £10,000 for three years, the largest fund ever received at Birkbeck. In her grant application, Franklin mentioned her new interest in animal virus research. She obtained Bernal's consent in July 1957, though serious concerns were raised after she disclosed her intentions to research live, instead of killed, polio virus at Birkbeck. Eventually, Bernal arranged for the virus to be safely stored at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine during the group's research. With her group, Franklin then commenced deciphering the structure of the polio virus while it was in a crystalline state. She attempted to mount the virus crystals in capillary tubes for X-ray studies, but was forced to end her work due to her rapidly failing health.

After Franklin's death, Klug succeeded her as group leader, and he, Finch and Holmes continued researching the structure of the polio virus. They eventually succeeded in obtaining extremely detailed X-ray images of the virus. In June 1959, Klug and Finch published the group's findings, revealing the polio virus to have icosahedral symmetry, and in the same paper suggested the possibility for all spherical viruses to possess the same symmetry, as it permitted the greatest possible number (60) of identical structural units. The team moved to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge in 1962, and the old Torrington Square laboratories were demolished four years later, in May 1966.

Pictures of Franklin's x-rays gave Watson and Crick the information they needed to develop their model of DNA as a double helix.

♨️ Get a look ♨️

A Timeline of Franklin's Life

1920 Rosalind Franklin was born
1941 graduated from Cambridge
1945 finished her phD
1947 Became a researhcer in Paris and developed her skill at x-ray crystallography
1951 Did x-ray diffraction at King's College in London
1953 Moved to Birkbeck College because of conflict with colleagues
1958 Died of ovarian cancer

Timeline information from Franklin's Wikipedia Page

written and coded by maDCoder 💉

A Tribute⏩ DNA/RNA ( Rosalind Franklin )