Rosalind Elsie Franklin

Rosalind Franklin was born in London, in 1920. After studying physical chemistry at Cambridge, she held a research post at the British Coal Utilization Research Association from 1942 to 1946.

 There, she helped establish carbon fibre technology. She became experienced in x-ray diffraction techniques at the Central Government Laboratory for Chemistry in Paris (1947-1950). In 1951, she returned to London to work on DNA at King's College.

Her excellently produced x-ray diffraction pictures of DNA were published in an issue of Nature in 1953. Later, she joined a laboratory at Birkbbeck College, London, where she worked on tobacco mosaic virus.

In 1962, she was to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (jointly with Watson, Crick and Wilkins), but she died in 1958, due to cancer.