Rosalind_Elsie_Franklin

{draw:rect} {draw:rect} {draw:rect} {draw:rect} Rosalind Elsie Franklin Eager to apply Franklin's x-ray diffraction skills to the problem of DNA structure, Randall had lured her to his lab with a Turner Newall Research Fellowship and the promise that Franklin would be working on one of the more pressing research problems of the era--puzzling out the structure and function of DNA. When Franklin arrived at Randall’s laboratory, she began working with Raymond Gosling, a student who had been attempting to capture pictures of the elusive DNA. Another scientist on the team, Maurice Wilkins, was already involved in the project assigned to Franklin. Wilkins and Franklin immediately had a personality conflict. But the animosity between the two did not detract Franklin from her work, and shortly after arriving at King's, she started x-raying DNA fibers that Wilkins had obtained from a Swiss investigator. Within a few months of joining Randall's team, Franklin gave a talk describing preliminary pictures she had obtained of the DNA as it transformed from a crystalline form, or A pattern, to a wet form, or B pattern, through an increase in relative humidity. The pictures showed, she suggested, that phosphate groups might lie outside the molecule. In the audience that November day sat James Watson, a twenty-four-year-old American who was also working on unraveling the molecular structure of DNA. Working with Francis Crick at Cambridge, Watson was skeptical of Franklin's refusal to set aside hard crystallographic data in favor of model building. Perhaps for that reason, Franklin remained publicly scornful of the notion gradually gaining adherents that the DNA molecule had a helical structure. In her unpublished reports, however, Franklin suggested the probability that the B form of DNA exhibited such a structure, as did, perhaps, the A form. In 1952, Franklin and Gosling continued to investigate DNA39s A pattern. By January 1953, Franklin had started model-building, but she could think of no structure that would accommodate all of the evidence she had gathered from her X-ray diffraction pictures. She ruled out both single and multiple-stranded helices in favor of a figure-eight shape. In the meantime, Watson and Crick had begun their own model building at Cambridge because they suspected that American chemist Linus Pauling was about to make a DNA discovery of his own. Watson had also grown quite close to Wilkins. As Watson recalls in his book “_The Double Helix”,_ Wilkins showed him without Franklin’s permission DNA diffraction pictures that Franklin had taken. Upon seeing the evidence he needed to prove the helical structure of DNA, Watson and Crick began writing what would become one of the best-known scientific papers of the century, "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid," in which they described a double-helix DNA molecular model. Franklin and Gosling, who had been working on a paper of their own, quickly revised it so that it could appear along with the Watson and Crick paper. Although it is unclear how close Franklin was to a similar discovery--in part because of the misleading A form--unpublished drafts of her paper reveal that she had deduced the sugar-phosphate backbone of the helix before Watson and Crick's model was made public. Rosalind Franklin died in London of cancer on April 16, 1958, at the early age of 37. This was four years before Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Many people believe that Franklin's work has been underestimated due to her untimely death and the female prejudices of the English scientific establishment in the 1950s. WORK CITED Thomson Gale, 2006. Science Resource Center. Gale. 07 February 2010 Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2006. Science Resource Center. Gale. 07 February 2010