Credit: Science Source / SPL
At the center of Rosalind Franklin’s tombstone, in London’s Willesden Jewish Cemetery, is the word “scientist.” This is followed by the inscription, “Your virus research and discoveries continue to be of lasting benefit to humanity.”
As one of the preeminent scientists of the 20th century, Franklin’s work has benefited all of humanity. The 100th anniversary of his birth this month is sparking much thought about his career and research contributions, most notably Franklin’s catalytic role in unraveling the structure of DNA.
She is best known for an X-ray diffraction image that she and her graduate student Raymond Gosling published in 1953.one, which was key to the determination of the DNA double helix.
But Franklin’s remarkable work on DNA amounts to a fraction of his history and legacy. She was a tireless researcher of the secrets of nature, and worked in biology, chemistry, and physics, with a focus on research that was important to society. She made important advances in carbon and carbon science, and became an expert in the study of viruses that cause disease in plants and humans. In essence, it is thanks to Franklin, her collaborators and successors, that today’s researchers can use tools such as DNA sequencing and X-ray crystallography to investigate viruses like SARS-CoV-2.
Franklin’s research career began in the physical sciences. In some of his early work in the 1940s, including his Ph.D., Franklin helped determine the density, structure, and composition of coal, a fossil fuel that was widely used to heat homes and for the energy industry. Franklin wanted to understand the porosity of coal, primarily to learn how to burn it more efficiently. But, as Patricia Fara, a science historian at the University of Cambridge, UK, points out, the porosity of carbon was also a key factor in the effectiveness of World War II gas masks, which contained activated carbon filters. As such, Franklin indirectly assisted in the design of personal protective equipment of her time.
Franklin Coal Research established his reputation. His first Nature The article, in January 1950, explored how certain electrons in carbon affect how X-rays scattertwo. The following year, he presented his most important contribution to coal science: the discovery that carbon formed as coal burns falls into one of two categories, graphitization or non-graphitization, and that each has a molecular structure different3. This work revealed the main difference between coke and coal, two products of burning coal. Coke could be transformed into crystalline graphite at high temperatures, while coal could not. The work also helped explain why coca is burned so efficiently, hot and with little smoke. This makes it useful in industrial processes that need to create large amounts of heat, such as casting in steel foundries.
From coal, Franklin went on to study viruses, which would fascinate her for the rest of her life. During the 1950s, he spent five productive years at Birkbeck College London using his X-ray skills to determine the structure of RNA in the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), which attacks plants and destroys tobacco crops. . The virus was discovered in the 1890s, when researchers tried to isolate the pathogen that was damaging plants, and found that it was too small to be a bacterium.
Franklin produced detailed X-ray diffraction images, which would become his hallmark. At one point, he corrected James Watson’s interpretation of the helical structure of TMV. Knowing the structure of the virus allowed other scientists to advance the early days of molecular biology and use TMV as a model to help break the genetic code.
With the TMV structure resolved, Franklin set out to study other plant viruses that ruined important agricultural crops, such as potatoes, turnips, tomatoes, and peas. Then, in 1957, he turned back to start studying the virus that causes polio, which is structurally similar to the yellow mosaic turnip virus. At the time, polio was a dreaded communicable disease. Most of it has since been eradicated, although cases persist in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Global connector
But time was not on Franklin’s side. In 1956, he was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and died two years later at the age of just 37. His collaborators Aaron Klug and John Finch published the structure of the poliovirus the following year, dedicating the document to his memory.4 4. Klug would be awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work to elucidate the structure of viruses.
Franklin was an inveterate traveler on the world conference circuit and collaborator with international partners. She won a rare grant (with Klug) from the US National Institutes of Health She was a global connector in the early days of research on virus structures: a pathogen virus expert who had gained an international reputation and he was deeply concerned with putting his research into practice.
It is a parody that Franklin is remembered primarily for not receiving full credit for his contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA. That part of Franklin’s life story should never be forgotten, but she was much more than the “unfair heroine”5 5, and it is time to recognize her for the breadth and depth of her research career.
