Rosalind Franklin

Chemist, Scientist (1920–1958)

Rosalind Franklin was the only one of the four researchers that had a degree in chemistry. She went to one of Cambridge University’s women’s colleges called Newnham College. She got her degree in 1941, and did graduate work at Cambridge for Ronald Norrish in the middle of World War II. In just one year, Franklin resigned her research scholarship in order to contribute to the war by working    at the British Coal Utilization Research Association. She returned to Cambridge for a short time to present a dissertation based on her work on investigations on the properties of graphite and coal. For this she was given a PhD in physical chemistry. Because of a  French friend, Franklin later got an appointment at the Laboratoire Centrale des Services Chimiques de l’Etat in Paris after the war. There she became a respected authority of X-ray crystallography after she was introduced to the technique. Franklin returned to King’s College London in 1951, where she was tasked with upgrading the X-ray crystallographic laboratory for work with DNA.