While heroes’ praises are sung daily, there’s an even larger population of geniuses who remain unknown, suffering in silence while revolutionizing a commoner’s life. Who plays a more significant part in doing so than discrimination itself? Especially when the tragedy of prejudice rids millions of opportunities, especially in fields as homogeneous as science! Despite numerous difficulties, a young female scientist persisted in the 1930s against an environment that solely favoured men, eventually assuming responsibility for one of humanity’s most earth-shattering discoveries.
Her name? Rosalind Franklin.
Rosalind Franklin was a woman of many interests, but nothing intrigued her more than studying the world around her and how it worked. Of course, this spurred her into pursuing physics and chemistry at Cambridge University, after which she specialized in the magical field of x-ray crystallography in chemistry. Eventually, she was offered a teaching position at King’s College London, making some outstanding discoveries. Unfortunately, she also had them taken away from her.
Franklin and Maurice Wilkins were working on a project to find the structure of the DNA molecule, which at the time remained a big mystery. In 1951, Franklin discovered the critical properties of DNA that would eventually lead to the determination of the molecule’s double helix structure.
However, Franklin and Wilkins’s relationship wasn’t the smoothest, and this led to Wilkins festering significant amounts of resentment. Eventually, Wilkins found his acquaintances Watson and Crick working on the same prospect that he and Rosalind were – determining the DNA molecule. Wilkins proceeded to show Watson and Crick unpublished data that Rosalind had previously been working on, as well as an image, Photo 51, that Rosalind captured through X-ray diffraction of the highly-coveted DNA molecule. Using their data and Rosalind Franklin’s photograph, Watson and Crick derived their DNA model, which would land them critical acclaim as well as a Nobel Prize for “their” breakthrough. All the while, Franklin remained entirely uncredited for her staggering work, namely photo 51 and her breakthrough, which directly led to the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA.
Despite being cheated so severely, Rosalind Franklin never stood down, even amongst the hubbub surrounding the victors of her stolen wok. Instead, she propelled through the fields of science, with her peak work not being the discovery of the DNA molecule but her breakthroughs in the sciences of coal, carbon, and even disease-causing viruses. In essence, her work in viruses were such advances that it is because of her that today’s researchers can use tools such as X-ray crystallography to investigate viruses such as SARS-Cov-2 or COVID 19.
Rosalind Franklin’s story teaches and inspires a league of young children to stand up and keep going despite what may be thrown at them. While she still hasn’t received her share of the Nobel Prize, the story of Franklin’s passion and love for science has captured the world’s heart, making sure that her name is sung for generations to come.
“She never stood down”
