Rosalind Franklin
Born in Notting Hill, London, UK in 1920 to a Jewish British family, Rosalind Franklin knew she wanted to be a scientist when she was 15-years-old and she learned X-Ray crystallography in France after studying at Cambridge University’s Newham College. She would use the x-ray crystallography at King’s College London alongside Raymond Gosling to take pictures of deoxyribonucleic acid which is commonly known as DNA. DNA contains the command in codes that we identify as genes, which tell the cells in the body how to make a certain protein. That protein’s job is to tell the cells to work and grow. DNA is made of chromosomes inherited from our parents and it makes us who we are.
While a Swiss biologist named Friedrich Miescher was the first to identify DNA in 1869 (the same year Gandhi was born), scientists were still trying to comprehend how it worked since under a microscope, DNA appeared as long, singular strands. That changed when Rosalind Franklin and her student took a picture called Photograph 51 and everything became all so clear about DNA! Photograph 51 showed that the long strands of DNA had a double helix which meant it was now possible to be decoded She also studied a copy of DNA called ribonucleic acid (RNA) that our bodies make as the next step in protein creation.
Then Maurice Wilkins took one look and decided that two blokes named James Watson and Francis Crick who then took credit for Rosalind’s work, without even asking for Rosalind’s permission. Back then, men didn’t think that women were smart enough to come up with such discoveries and they saw them as submissive. 24/7 baby machines who should be punished severely if they did something they disapprove of like having a career and deciding how to dress and what to do with their bodies. While Wilkins, Crick and Watson did realise that Photograph 51 was very important (as well as the double helix), they decided to not give Rosalind any credit AT ALL! THE GALL! THE AUDACITY OF THEM! THEY DECIDED TO LET SCIENTISTS CHANGE THEIR AND OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE HUMAN BODY AND HOW ROSALIND’S WORK HELPED TO MAKE IMPORTANT ADVANCES IN MEDICINE WITHOUT CREDITING THE FEMALE JEWISH BRITISH CHEMIST WHILE SHE HAD A PULSE!
Four years after Rosalind Franklin died of cancer at the young age of 37, the three BOZOS (Maurice Wilkins, James Watson and Frank Crick) won the Nobel Prize (an award that CAN NEVER be given to someone after they die) for “discovering the chemical structure of DNA” (code for taking credit and suppressing the hard work of Rosalind Franklin who made that discovery first”. It took until many years after her death that those SODS remembered “oh wait, a lady got to our work first” was when Rosalind Franklin was finally given the credit SHE DESERVED DAY 1! GET THIS! James Watson (who died recently in November 2025) brought her up in his 1968 book “The Double Helix” and then Anne Sayre wrote a biography on Rosalind in 1975. Although her contributions to the disciplines of coal (her research into coal which lead to its wartime use in WW2 gas masks) and virus research were acknowledged by her peers during her lifetime, it was these papers that made her significant contribution to the finding of DNA public years after her death in 1958. Rosalind Franklin has only started getting the credit she deserved DECADES AGO if it weren’t for sexism (discrimination and exclusion based on one’s gender).