Rosalind Franklin

At 37 years old, Rosalind Franklin physical status not available right now. We will update Rosalind Franklin's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Rosalind Elsie Franklin (25 July 1920 – 16 April 1958), an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer, whose work was vital in the discovery of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), viruses, coal, and graphite.

Although her lifetime achievements in coal and viruses were lauded, her contributions to DNA's discovery were largely acknowledged posthumously. Franklin, the son of a prominent British Jewish family, was educated at Norland Place in West London, Lindores School for Young Ladies in Sussex, and St Paul's Girls' School, London.

At Newnham College, Cambridge, she studied the Natural Sciences Tripos, which she received in 1941.

She received a research fellowship at the University of Cambridge, where Ronald George Wreyford Norrish, who was dissatisfied with her inability, was criticized for her lack of enthusiasm.

In 1942, the British Coal Utilization Research Association (BCURA) offered her a research position and began working on coals.

This helped her get a Ph.D.

In 1945, the United States was a republic in Germany.

She joined Paris in 1947 as a chercheur (postdoctoral researcher) under Jacques Mering at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat, where she became a top-ray crystallographer.

She began as a research associate at King's College London in 1951 and worked on X-ray diffraction studies, which would later aid the DNA's double helix theory.

In 1953, after two years of being frustrated with her manager John Randall and even with her colleague Maurice Wilkins, she was forced to transfer to Birkbeck College.

John Desmond Bernal, chair of the physics department, at Birkbeck, offered her a separate research team.

She died in 1958 of ovarian cancer at the age of 37. Franklin is best known for her studies on X-ray diffraction photographs of DNA, particularly Photo 51, while at King's College London, which resulted in the discovery of the DNA double helix, which earned James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962.

Watson predicted that Franklin would have ideally been rewarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Wilkins, but that the Nobel Committee generally does not make posthumous nominations after completing her work on viruses.

Aaron Klug, a member of her team, continued her experiments after winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982.

Early life

Franklin converted a wealthy and influential British Jewish family in 50 Chepstow Villas, Notting Hill, London, on July 25, 1920.

Ellis Arthur Franklin (1894–1964), a liberationist London merchant banker who studied at the city's Working Men's College, and her mother, Muriel Frances Waley (1894–1976), were among Franklin's children. Rosalind was the elder daughter and the second child in a family of five children. David (1919–1986) was the eldest brother of her younger siblings, Colin (1926–2020), and Jenifer (born 1929) were her younger siblings.

Herbert Samuel (later Viscount Samuel), who was the Home Secretary in 1916 and the first practicing Jew to serve in the British Cabinet, was Franklin's paternal uncle. Helen Caroline Franklin, known in the family as Mamie, was married to Norman de Mattos Bentwich, the Attorney General in the British Mandate of Palestine. Helen was involved in trade unions and the women's suffrage campaign, as well as a member of the London County Council. Hugh Franklin, Franklin's uncle, was another prominent figure in the suffrage movement, but his activities in that regard shocked the Franklin family. "Elsie," Rosalind's middle name, was in honor of Hugh's first wife, who died in 1918 influenza pandemic. Her family was active at the Working Men's College, where her father taught electricity, magnetism, and the history of the Great War in the evenings before he became the vice principal.

Franklin's parents were able to help settle Jewish refugees from Europe who had survived the Holocaust, especially those from the Kindertransport. They took in two Jewish children to their house, and one of them, a nine-year-old Austrian, Evi Eisenstädter, shared Jenifer's room. (After liberation, Emilias Eisenstädter's father was jailed in Buchenwald, and the family adopted the surname "Ellis."

Franklin demonstrated extraordinary scholastic skills from an early age. She joined Roland at Norland Place School, a private day school in West London, at the age of six. "Rosalind is alarmingly clever" at the time, and she and her husband, Helen Bentwich, enjoyed all their time doing arithmetic for pleasure, and invariably get her sums correct." She also took an early interest in cricket and hockey. She began attending Lindores School for Young Ladies in Sussex at the age of nine years old. The school was located near the seaside, and the family wanted a safe environment for their fragile wellbeing.

She was 11 years old when she began at St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, west London, one of London's few girls' schools that taught physics and chemistry. She excelled in science, Latin, and sports at St Paul's academy. She also learned German and became fluent in French, a language she'll later use. She ranked her classes and gained annual awards. Her sole educational deficit was in music, for which the school music director, Gustav Holst, called on her mother to inquire if she had suffered from hearing difficulties or tonsillitis. She graduated from high school in 1938, winning a university scholarship, the School Leaving Exhibition, £30 a year, and £5 from her grandfather. Her father begged her to give the award to a deserving refugee student.

In 1938, Franklin arrived at Newnham College, Cambridge, and studied chemistry within the Natural Sciences Tripos. Bill Price, who served with her as a laboratory organiser and later became one of her senior colleagues at King's College London, was on display there. In 1941, she was given second-class honours from her final exams. The distinction was made as a bachelor's degree in career-related studies. Women from 1947 were granted prestigious BA and MA degrees, and the previous women graduates were awarded these retroactively. Adrienne Weill, a former student of Marie Curie, had a major influence on her life and work, and she helped her to improve her conversational French during her last year in Cambridge.

Franklin was given a research fellowship at Newnham College, where she joined the University of Cambridge's physical chemistry laboratory to work under Ronald George Wreyford Norrish, who later received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She had no success in her first year of work. Norrish was "obstinate and almost perverse in argument, overbearing and alert to critique," as he was compared to his biographer. He could not decide on a work for her. He was already addicted to heavy alcohol at the time. Franklin wrote that he made her despise him completely. She completed the National Service Acts while serving as an assistant research officer at the British Coordination Research Association (BCURA) in 1942, resigning from Norrish's Lab. The BCURA was located on the Coombe Springs Estate near Kingston upon Thames, near London's southern boundary. At BCURA, Norrish served as an advisor to the military. John G. Bennett was the producer. While Franklin worked at BCURA, Marcello Pirani and Victor Goldschmidt, both refugees from the Nazi era, were consultants and lectured there. She started attending Adrienne Weill's boarding house in Cambridge until her cousin, Irene Franklin, suggested that they share living quarters in a vacated house in Putney that belonged to her uncle. She joined Irene as an Air Raid Warden and regularly went on patrols to see people in the aftermath of air raids.

She investigated coal's porosity using helium to determine its density. She found the connection between the fine constrictions in the pores of coals and the permeability of the porous space as a result of this. She helped classify coals and accurately forecast their success for combustion purposes and in the manufacture of wartime equipment such as gas masks by concluding that substances were rejected in order of molecular size as temperature increased. This research was the basis of her PhD dissertation The physical chemistry of solid organic colloids, with particular emphasis on coal for which the University of Cambridge gave her a PhD in 1945. It was also the basis of many papers.

Personal life

Franklin was best described as an agnostic. Her apparent lack of religious convictions did not stem from anyone's clout but rather from her own line of thinking. As a child, she sparked her skepticism. Her mother recalled that she refused to believe in the existence of God and remarked, "Well, how do you know He isn't She?" She later made her position clear, now based on her scientific education, and wrote to her father in 1940:'s 1940: a woman argued for her mother.'

However, she did not abandon Jewish values. She had Hebrew lessons on her own while her classmates went to church as the only Jewish student at Lindores School. She joined the Jewish Society early in her first term at Cambridge out of admiration for her grandfather's request. Franklin told her sister that she was "always a Jew."

Franklin loved traveling, particularly trekking. She first "qualified" for a holiday in Menton, France, where her grandfather's grandfather managed to escape the English winter. Her family used to holiday in Wales or Cornwall. A trip to France in 1938 gave her a lasting love for France and its language. At the time, she considered the French lifestyle "completely superior to that of England." In comparison, she portrayed English people as having "vacant stupid faces and childlike complacency." When World War II was declared on their way home, her family was almost trapped in Norway in 1939. In another case, she and Jean Kerslake hiked the French Alps together in 1946, which almost cost her her life. She fell off a slope and was only rescued. "I am quite positive I could wander happily in France for the rest of my life," she told her mother. The people, the country, and the food are all wonderful.

She made several business trips to the United States, was notably jovial with her American friends, and her humour was on full display. William Ginoza of the University of California, Los Angeles, later remembered that she was the opposite of Watson's description of her, and that Americans loved her "sunny side," as Maddox said.

Watson's book The Double Helix gives his first-person account of DNA search and discovery. Franklin is depicted in a sympathetic yet sometimes critical portrait. She praises her intelligence and scientific acumen, but her appearance portrays her as a laborious and careless individual. After introducing her in the book as "Rosalind," he writes that he and his male colleagues referred to her as "Rosy" in the text. She was never identified as "Rosy" in the textbook. She didn't want to be called by that name because she had a great-aunt Rosy. She was referred to as "Ros" in the family. To others, she was just "Rosalind." When sitting at Crick's table in Cambridge's The Eagle pub, she made it clear to an American visiting friend, Dorothea Raacke. Raacke asked her how she was going to be called and she replied, "I'm afraid it will have to be Rosalind," she replied, "most definitely not Rosy."

She has often expressed her political convictions. She blamed Winston Churchill for starting the war but then praised him for his speeches. Professor John Ryle was a strong advocate for parliament in the 1940 Cambridge University by-election, but he was dissatisfied.

She didn't appear to have a personal relationship with anyone and instead kept her deepest personal feelings to herself. She avoided close friendship with the opposite sex during her youth. Evi Ellis, who had formerly lived in her bedroom and who later married Ernst Wohlfgemuth and had moved to Notting Hill from Chicago, tried matchmaking her with Ralph Miliband, but she failed. Franklin once told Evi that her flatmate asked her for a drink, but she did not know what was intended. Mering, her French mentor, was incredibly infatuated, having a husband and a mistress. Mering also confessed to being captivated by her "intelligence and beauty." Franklin did confess her love for Merging while undergoing a second surgery, according to Anne Sayre, but Maddox denied it. Mering wept when he visited her later and destroyed all her letters after her death.

Donald Caspar, a post-doctoral student at the University of Delaware, was her first personal affair. After a trip to University of California, Berkeley, in 1956, she visited him at his home in Colorado, and she was shocked to remark later that Caspar was one "may have loved" and "may have married." She wrote to Sayre, describing him as a "ideal match."

Franklin first noticed a health problem in mid-1956 while on a work-related trip to the United States. Although zipping her skirt in New York, she had a problem; her stomach had bulged. Mair Livingstone, who asked her, "You're not pregnant?" she asked back in London. "I wish I were," she moaned. Her case was branded "URGENT." Two tumours in her abdomen were discovered during an operation on September 4th of the same year. Franklin spent time with various acquaintances and family friends during this period and other times of hospitalization. Anne Sayre, Francis Crick, his partner Odile, with whom Franklin had a close relationship, and then the Roland and Nina Franklin family, where Rosalind's nieces and nephews cheered her spirits.

Franklin decided not to live with her parents because her mother's uncontrollable grief and screaming made her cry. Franklin continued to work, and her group continued to produce results – seven papers in 1956 and six more in 1957 – although not undergoing cancer treatment. Franklin became sick at the end of 1957 and was admitted to the Royal Marsden Hospital. She made her will on December 2nd. She appointed her three brothers executors and named Aaron Klug as the principal beneficiary, who will receive £3,000 and her Austin vehicle. Mair Livingstone will earn £2,000, Anne Piper £1,000, and her nurse Miss Griffith £250, among her many others. The remainder of the estate was to be used for charities.

She returned to work in January 1958, and she was also granted a promotion to Research Associate in Biophysics on February 25. On March 30, she became ill again, and she died of bronchopneumonia, secondary carcinomatosis, and ovarian cancer in Chelsea, London. Exposure to X-ray radiation is often regarded as a contributing factor in her illness. Other members of her family's family have died of cancer, and the incidence of gynaecological cancer is suspected to be unusually high among Ashkenazi Jews. According to her death certificate, a research scientist, Spinster, Ellis Arthur Franklin, a banker. She was interred in the family plot at Willesden United Synagogue Cemetery in Brent's Beaconsfield Road on Saturday.

The inscription on her tombstone reads:

Franklin's will was established on June 30th, with her estate valued at £11,278 10s for probate. 9d. (equivalent to £280,328 in 2021).

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Career and research

Franklin asked Adrienne Weill for assistance and to alert her of job openings for "a physical chemist who knows little about physical chemistry but a lot about the holes in coal" when World War II came to an end in 1945. Weill introduced Marcel Mathieu, the director of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), the network of institutes that support the main portion of the French government's scientific research labs at a conference in the fall of 1946. Voilà, she was recruited at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'État in Paris by Jacques Mering. She joined the Mering labo (as referred to by the workers) on February 14 as one of the fifteen chercheurs (researchers).

Mering was an X-ray crystallographer who applied X-ray diffraction to the study of rayon and other amorphous compounds, in contrast to the thousands of ordinary crystals that had been studied by this technique for many years. He taught her how to use X-ray crystallography to amorphous materials. New questions regarding experiment design and data interpretation were presented by this. Franklin applied them to further problems related to coal and other carbonaceous materials, particularly the changes to atom assembly when they were converted to graphite. She has written several more papers on this subject, which has now become part of the mainstream of physics and chemistry of coal and carbon. Graphitizing and non-graphitizing carbon were coined by Sherry in a novel. In a 1993 monograph and in the recently published textbook Chemistry and Physics of Carbon, the coal work was covered. Mering continued to investigate carbon in various ways, using X-ray diffraction and other techniques.

Franklin was granted a three-year Turner & Newall Fellowship to study at King's College London in 1950. She began working as a research associate in the Medical Research Council's (MRC) Biophysics Unit, led by John Randall in January 1951. Randall originally planned to work on X-ray diffraction of proteins and lipids, but she redirected her efforts to DNA fibres due to recent advances in the field, and she was to be the only experienced experimental diffraction researcher at King's at the time. Randall resigned early in his tenure at King's because of DNA researcher Maurice Wilkins' pioneering work, and he recalled Raymond Gosling, the graduate student who had been living with Wilkins, to be her assistant.

Rudolf Signer, a Berne Swiss chemist, obtained a highly purified DNA sample from calf thymus in 1950. Wilkins was one of the recipients of the Freedom DNA test, later identified as the Signer DNA at the Faraday Society in London in early May 1950, and Wilkins was one of the recipients. Using crude equipment, Wilkins and Gosling obtained a high-quality diffraction snapshot of the DNA sample, which sparked even more curiosity in this molecule. Randall, on the other hand, had not told them that he had asked Franklin to handle both the DNA diffraction and mentoring of Gosling's thesis. Randall told Franklin that "in a letter from December 1950, only yourself and Gosling will be affected by the experimental X-ray project." Randall's inability to inform this reassignment had a large part in the well-documented rivalry that developed between Wilkins and Franklin. When Wilkins returned, he gave the Signer DNA and Gosling to Franklin.

Franklin, who is now employed with Gosling, began applying her X-ray diffraction techniques to DNA synthesis. Wilkins' latest fine-focus X-ray tube and microcamera were used by her, but she refined, adjusted, and focused meticulously. A significant innovation she employed was making the camera chamber that could be adjusted for its humidity using various saturated salt solutions, drawing on her physical chemistry experience. When Wilkins inquired about the latest technology, she replied in terms that offended him because she had "an air of cool superiority."

Although being brief, impatient, and direct, Franklin's habit of closely looking people in the eyes angered several of her coworkers. Wilkins, in comparison, was a shy, calculating in speech when he avoided looking directly in the eye. Franklin was soon able to produce X-ray photos of higher quality than Wilkins'. She found that the DNA sample could exist in two ways: at a relative humidity high above 75%, the DNA fiber became long and thin; when it was drier, it became short and fat. She first referred to the former as "wet" and the latter as "crystalline," and that the former was described as "crystalline."

Franklin's first report on the crystalline DNA's structure was published in her notebook, which reads: "Evidence for spiral [meaning helical] construction" is found in her notebook. A straight chain untwisted is very useful. There is no evidence of reflections on the meridian's [crystalline] form, suggesting a spiral structure." The phosphate group was discovered within the main DNA chain, as an immediate result; she was unable to decide whether there are two or three chains. In November 1951, she presented their findings at a lecture at King's College London. She wrote the following in her lecture notes: : The following was written:

For the "crystalline" and "wet" styles, Franklin began with "A" and "B" respectively. (A-DNA's biological functions were first detected only 60 years ago.) Randall split the DNA work into two separate chapters due to Franklin and Wilkins' intense personal rivalry. Franklin selected the data-rich "A" model, while Wilkins selected the "B" version.

The B-DNA was generally accepted at King's by the end of 1951, but Franklin, who had shot an asymmetrical snapshot in May 1952, was dissatisfied that the A-DNA was a helix. Franklin and Gosling released a funeral notice in July 1952, regretting the 'death' of helical A-DNA, which runs as a practical joke on Wilkins (who frequently stated that both forms of DNA were helical).

They were involved with Patterson's operation on X-ray images of DNA that they had created during 1952. This was a lengthy and labor-intensive process, but it would provide us with significant insight into the molecule's architecture. Franklin was entirely committed to experimental science and had skepticism against theoretical or model buildings, saying, "We are not going to speculate, we are going to wait, we are going to wait, and we are going to let the spots on this photograph tell us what the [DNA] structure is." John Desmond Bernal's "amongst the most stunning X-ray photos of any substance ever taken" in the X-ray diffraction images, which include Gosling's historic Photo 51, which was shot at this time.

Franklin had sorted through her conflicting results by January 1953, concluding that both DNA forms had two helices and that a sequence of three draft manuscripts needed a double helical DNA backbone in two of which were published (see below). On March 6, 1953, her two A-DNA manuscripts arrived in Acta Crystallographica in Copenhagen, one day before Crick and Watson's model on B-DNA was completed. She must have sent them when the Cambridge team was designing their model, and she may have written them before she learned of them. "In light of recent findings" by the King's and Cambridge research teams, she modified one of these "in proof" Acta papers on July 8.

The third draft paper was based on the B-DNA, which was discovered years earlier among her papers by Franklin's Birkbeck colleague Aaron Klug. In 1974, he published an analysis of the draft's close connection with the third of the original three Nature DNA papers in April. Klug conceived this paper to complement the first article he had published in 1968 defending Franklin's important contributions to DNA structure. In reaction to James Watson's incomplete picture of Franklin's work in his 1968 memoir, The Double Helix, he had written this first article.

He travelled to King's on January 30, 1953 carrying a preprint of Linus Pauling's incorrectly drawn DNA map, as vividly portrayed by Watson. Watson went to Franklin's lab to tell him that they should all collaborate before Pauling found his mistake. When Watson said she did not know how to interpret her own information, the impoverished Franklin became enraged. Watson has retreated, reverting to Wilkins, who had been attracted by the spectacle. Wilkins commiserated with his harried colleague and then showed Watson Franklin's DNA X-ray photograph. Watson, in turn, showed Wilkins a prepublication manuscript by Pauling and Robert Corey, which had a DNA scheme that looked remarkably like their first incorrect model.

James Watson and Francis Crick of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge University, 1953, began to develop a molecular model of the B-DNA using statistics similar to those available to both teams at King's. They designed a triple helix model that was immediately proven to be ineffective based on Franklin's lecture in November 1951 that DNA was helical with either two or three stands. Franklin's study was complete by February 1953, well before she's transfer to Birkbeck, and her results were crucial. Model building had been used successfully in the discovery of the alpha helix by Linus Pauling in 1951, but Franklin was opposed to building theoretical models before enough data was obtained to properly guide the model development. She maintained that building a model would only be carried out after sufficient information about the building was known. Pauling and Corey were both born in the late 1950s (first published in February 1953) with an erroneous triple helix style, thereby boosting her conviction.

She wanted to avoid putting forward inaccurate information because she was always cautious. Photographs of her Birkbeck work table reveal that she routinely used small molecular models, but not ones on the grand scale used at Cambridge for DNA. Max Perutz, Crick's thesis advisor, gave Crick a copy of a study commissioned for a Medical Research Council biophysics committee visit to King's in February 1953, which contained many of Franklin's crystallographic estimates.

Wilkins was sent by Gosling in recognition that Franklin had chosen to transfer to Birkbeck College and Randall had requested that all DNA work be retained at King's. Watson and Crick thought they had solved the problem sufficiently for Crick to announce (in the local pub) that they had "discovered the mystery of life" by 28 February 1953. However, they knew they would have to finish their model before they could be certain.

Watson and Crick started building their model on March 7, 1953, just days before Wilkins told Franklin that they would no longer be able to move and that they should go "all hands to the pump." This was just one day after Franklin's two A-DNA papers made it to Acta Crystallographica. Wilkins returned to King's the following week, according to Franklin's biographer Brenda Maddox, who reportedly advised Gosling on his return to King's.

How and when Franklin realized and accepted that B-DNA was a double helical molecule was one of the most important and forgotten moments in DNA research. Franklin did not know of the double helical existence before knowing of the Cambridge model. Klug first examined Franklin's papers after her death. However, he later discovered the original manuscript draft, which indicated that Franklin had already established the correct layout, which made it clear that the correct one had been verified. Watson-Crick's coverage made it to King's the next day, implying that Franklin would have learned of it much later than she had moved to Birkbeck. Franklin had already knew of the helical system for B-DNA in February 1953 but was uncertain of the number of strands," she wrote. Her conclusion regarding the helical origins was clear, but she struggled to comprehend the complete scheme of DNA strands in the event that two strands running in opposite directions did not occur to her.

"Structure B does not comply with single helical model even for low layer-lines," she started to investigate the signs of double strands near the end of February. It soon dawned on her that the B-DNA and A-DNA were genetically linked, and that A-DNA was regarded as a "unwound version" of B-DNA. "A Note on Molecular Configuration of Sodium Thymonucleate" by She and Gosling was published on March 17th. There seemed to be only one (hand-written) change after the Watson–Crick model was identified when it was published, and it came as such in the three Nature articles; the other modification was the removal of "A Note on" from the title.

Franklin wrote to Crick on Monday, asking for permission to see their model a week later. Even after seeing the Watson–Crick model, Franklin maintained her reservations for early model building, and she remained unimpressed. "It's very pretty, but how are they going to prove it?" She is reported to have said. Franklin seems to have been interested in accumulating more evidence before releasing-as-proven a new one. Her reaction to the Watson–Crick model was in keeping with her cautious science approach.

Crick and Watson's model was published in Nature on April 25, 1953, with only a footnote acknowledging that "having been stimulated by a general awareness of Franklin and Wilkins' "unpublished" contribution, they had only enough detail to base their model. Following a collaboration between the two laboratory scientists, articles by Wilkins and Franklin, which contained their X-ray diffraction results, the two lab directors' and Franklin's articles were updated and published in Nature's second and third edition, but mostly in favor of the Crick and Watson theoretical paper which suggested a model for the B-DNA. The majority of the scientific community waited for several years before accepting the double helix plan. Primarily geneticists adopted the model for the first because of its obvious genetic connections.

Franklin left King's College London in mid-March 1953 for Birkbeck College, a change that had been planned for some time and that she described as "going from a palace to the slums... but the same." She was recruited by physics department chair John Desmond Bernal, a crystallographer who was known for promoting female crystallographers. Franklin regularly took Bernal to task over the careless attitudes of some of the other laboratory workers, particularly after pharmacists flooded her first-floor lab with water on one occasion.

Despite Bernal's parting words to avoid her involvement in nucleic acids, she helped Gosling complete his thesis, but she wasn't yet his chief boss. In the 25 July issue of Nature, they found the first evidence of double helix in the A form of DNA. Bernal received grants for Franklin from the Agricultural Research Council (ARC), allowing her to serve as a senior scientist supervising her own research group at the end of 1954. After John Finch, a physics student at King's College London, joined Franklin's group in 1955, Kenneth Holmes, a Cambridge graduate, followed him in July 1955. Franklin wrote to Bernal that the existing facilities were still unsuitable for conducting research "...my desk and lab are on the fourth floor, my X-ray tube in the basement, and I am in charge of the work of four people on two separate staircases."

Franklin continued to investigate RNA, a molecule that is similarly important to life as DNA. She used X-ray crystallography to determine the cellular basis of the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), a RNA virus. In early 1954, she met Aaron Klug, which resulted in a long-running and fruitful collaboration. Klug had just earned his PhD from Trinity College in Cambridge and joined Birkbeck in late 1953. Franklin's first major works on TMV in Nature, in which she said that all TMV virus particles were of the same length, she began publishing her first major works on TMV in Nature in 1955. This was in direct opposition to Norman Pirie's eminent virologist's theories, but her observation was ultimately correct.

Franklin assigned the research of TMV's complete system to her PhD student Holmes. They soon discovered (first published in 1956) that TMV's coating was composed of protein molecules embedded in helices. Klug worked on spherical viruses with his student Finch, with Franklin assisting and supervising the operation. They began publishing seminal research on TMV, cucumber virus 4 and Turnip yellow mosaic virus as a team in 1956.

James Watt, a research assistant, was also funded by the National Coal Board and now is the head of the ARC group in Birkbeck. The Birkbeck team members continued researching RNA viruses that affect several plants, including potato, turnip, tomato, and pea. Donald Caspar, an American post-doctoral student, joined the team in 1955. He worked on the precise location of RNA molecules in TMV. In 1956, he and Franklin published individual but complementary papers in Nature's 10 March issue, in which they discovered that the RNA in TMV is wound along the hollow virus's inner surface. Caspar was not an enthusiastic writer, and Franklin had to write the whole manuscript for him.

Her research grant from the ARC came to an end at the end of 1957, but she was never given the full salary recommended by Birkbeck. After Bernal requested that ARC chairman Lord Rothschild be recalled, she was granted a one-year extension until March 1958.

Expo 58, the first major international fair since World War II, was scheduled in Brussels in 1958. Franklin was encouraged to create a five-foot high model of TMV, which she started in 1957. Table tennis balls and plastic bicycle handlebar grips were among her table tennis balls and plastic bicycle handlebar grips. On the 17th of April, one day after she died, the Brussels world fair, with an exhibit of her virus model at the International Science Pavilion, opened.

Franklin visited Berkeley, California, where colleagues advised that her group investigate the polio virus. She applied for a grant from the United States Public Health Service of the National Institutes of Health, which is equivalent to £10,000 (equivalent to £256,495 in 2021) for three years, the largest fund ever received at Birkbeck. Franklin expressed her new interest in animal virus research in her grant application. Bernal obtained Bernal's permission in July 1957, but serious questions were raised after she announced that she intends to study live rather than killing the polio virus at Birkbeck. Eventually, Bernal arranged for the virus to be safely stored at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine during the company's studies. Franklin, a feminist woman, and her staff, began deciphering the polio virus's anatomy while it was still in a crystalline form. She attempted to embed the virus crystals in capillary tubes for X-ray research but was forced to suspend her study due to her rapidly declining health.

Klug assumed charge of the group after Franklin's death, and Finch and Holmes continued to investigate the polio virus's genetics. They did eventually succeed in getting X-ray photos of the virus. Klug and Finch published their findings in June 1959, revealing that the polio virus had icosahedral symmetry, and that all spherical viruses could have the same symmetry because it allowed the largest possible number (60) of similar structural units to exist. The team moved to the University of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, in 1962, and the old Torrington Square laboratories were demolished four years later, in May 1966.

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