Rosalind Franklin: “Science and Everyday Life Cannot Be Separated”

In the summer of 1940 Rosalind Franklin was nineteen and had finished her second year reading natural sciences at Newnham College, Cambridge. France had fallen in June, the Blitz was weeks away, and her father, Ellis Franklin, a banker and a devout man active in Jewish charities, was worried about her. He wrote to say that she had developed a completely one-sided outlook and looked at everything in terms of science.

Her reply is the letter the quote comes from. She turned the charge around: it was he who treated science as something apart from real life, an invention of man to be kept cautiously away from everyday existence. For her the two could not be separated. Science gave a partial explanation of life, and as far as it went it rested on fact, experience and experiment, which was more than she could say for beliefs people held because they were pleasant to hold.

The letter goes on to the thing her father really wanted to argue about, which was faith. She agreed that faith was essential to success in life, but would not accept his definition of it as belief in life after death. All faith needed, she wrote, was the belief that by doing our best we come nearer to success, and that the aim, the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future, was worth attaining. It is as close to a creed as she ever wrote, and she lived by it for eighteen more years.

What followed was coal and carbon at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association during the war, X-ray crystallography in Paris, and at King's College London in 1951 the work on DNA that produced Photo 51, the X-shaped diffraction pattern that told Watson and Crick they were looking at a helix. Her everyday life was not separate from any of it: she cooked for her colleagues, climbed in the Alps and the Dolomites, and argued about politics at dinner. For a mathematician who refused the same separation between ideas and the world, read Kepler's “where there is matter, there is geometry”, and for the feeling of an explanation that is only partial, Feynman's “I was born not knowing”.

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born in Notting Hill, London, into a prominent Anglo-Jewish family. She went to St Paul's Girls' School and to Newnham College, Cambridge, and from 1942 worked on the microstructure of coal for the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, work that became her Cambridge PhD in 1945 and that still underlies carbon-fibre science. From 1947 to 1950 she learned X-ray diffraction in Jacques Mering's laboratory in Paris, the happiest years of her life.

At King's College London from 1951 she and her student Raymond Gosling produced the sharpest X-ray photographs of DNA yet taken, including Photo 51 in May 1952, and she worked out that the molecule's phosphate backbone lay on the outside. The photograph was shown to James Watson without her knowledge in January 1953, and the Watson–Crick model followed in April. She moved to Birkbeck College that year and, with Aaron Klug, did pioneering work on the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus and the polio virus. She died of ovarian cancer in London in April 1958, at 37. The Nobel Prize for the structure of DNA was awarded in 1962 to Watson, Crick and Wilkins.