Natural Science Forum / Biology / Biology / December 2004

http://www.britannica.com/ebc/article?eu=390161

Franklin, Rosalind (Elsie)
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Rosalind Franklin

born July 25, 1920, London, Eng.
died April 16, 1958, London

British biologist.

After graduating from the University of Cambridge, she conducted
important experimental work for the coal and coke industries. She
later produced the X-ray diffraction pictures that allowed James D.
Watson and Francis Crick to deduce that the three-dimensional form of
DNA was a double helix. In studies of the tobacco mosaic virus, she
helped show that its RNA is located in its protein rather than in its
central cavity and that this RNA is a single-stranded helix rather
than the double helix found in the DNA of bacterial viruses and higher
organisms. Her death from cancer at age 37 probably cost her a share
of the 1962 Nobel Prize awarded to Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins.

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    "Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice.
It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved."
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