Asteroid named for her, a Mars Rover named for her.
Rosalind Elsie Franklin was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal and graphite. She was recognized for her work and coal in her lifetime, but the rest of her work went unrecognized, leading her to be called a feminist icon and the Sylvia Plath of molecular biology.
In 1941 she graduated from Cambridge University, and hoped to continue on to her PhD there, but was disappointed by the Chair of Physical Chemistry’s lack of enthusiasm in her work, so she took up a research position under the British Coal Utilization Research Association, and achieved the PhD in 1945. After working as a postdoctoral researcher in France from 1947 – 1951, she joined King’s College London, as a research associate, discovering the key properties of DNA. She is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA, notably Photo 51, which led to the discovery of the double helix for which three men shared the Nobel prize in 1962 (well after her death). Disagreements at Kings College led her to move to Birbeck College, where she engaged in pioneering work on the molecular structure of viruses. In 1956, Franklin visited the University of California, Berkeley, where colleagues 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 (equivalent to £256,495 in 2021) for three years, the largest fund ever received at Birkbeck. She died of ovarian cancer the day before she was to unveil the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus in 1958. Her team member, Aaron Klug continued the research, winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982.
She faced a lot of sexism working as a chemist – not just in terms of lack of recognition, but also lack of facilities for women in research institutions that had separate eating facilities for women, and more. Since 1982, there have been at least 51 major recognitions per Wikipedia.
