Rosalind Elise Franklin was born on July 25, 1920 in London, England, and died on April 16, 1958 in London, England of ovarian cancer at the young age of 37. Franklin perhaps died though without proper recognition of some of her achievements. Franklin decided at the young age of fifteen to become a scientist. In 1941, she graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge. The work for which did in 1942 at the British Coal Utilization Association where she made the essential studies of carbon and graphite microstructures. The work that she performed here was the groundwork for her doctorate from Cambridge University in 1945 in physical chemistry.
For three years in Paris while she worked for the Laboratoire Central des Services Chiminques de L?Etat she learned X-ray diffraction techniques. After leaving Paris, she went back to England to work in the laboratory at King's College, Cambridge with John Randall. Here at Randall's lab would Franklin she run into Maurice Wilkes. Wilkes in 1962 would receive a Nobel Prize with James Watson and Francis Crick for the double-helix model of DNA. This was only four years after Franklin's death in 1958.
Rosalind Franklin made considerable strides not only for women of her time but also for the future of modern science. Without Rosalind's X-ray, photographs Watson would never have solved the final piece of the puzzle to the DNA structure model. .
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