Rosalind Franklin was born into a wealthy Jewish family in London, England. Franklin's father, Ellis Franklin, was a professor of electromagnetism and World War I history at the Working Men's College and later became president of the school. His father's given name is also his middle name. Rosalind Franklin studied at St Paul's Girls' School before entering college; she decided to become a chemist while still in high school. After entering college in 1938, she began studying chemistry. She had conceived the chemical structure of DNA in 1939 and painted a spiral pattern and graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge University in 1941. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Franklin received her PhD from Cambridge University at that time Cambridge did not award the degree to any women. student. In the fall of 1946, Franklin was appointed to the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat in France, where she worked with Jacques Mering. In France he learned about X-ray diffraction, which would play an important role in his research and later become his discovery of DNA. In 1951, Franklin was offered a 3-year research fellowship at King's College London and joined John Randall's laboratory. With his knowledge, Franklin was to create and improve the X-ray crystallography unit at King's College. In John Randall's laboratory, he met Maurice Wilkins. She and Wilkins led separate research groups and had worked in different fields, although they were both involved in the study of DNA. Before Randall gave Franklin responsibility for his DNA project, no one had worked on it for more than a month. Wilkins was away at the time, when he returned he realized he had misunderstood her role, he thought she was a technical assistant. Both scientists were peers. His mistake, recognized but never overcome, was not surprised by the climate reserved for women at the university at the time, only men were allowed in the university canteens. Please note: this is just an example. Get a Custom Paper From Our Expert Writers Now In May 1952, Franklin and his student Raymond Gosling conducted a long period of research to obtain an X-ray crystal diffraction photo of type B DNA and assigned the Patterson function specifically to resolve the diffraction problems of X-ray crystals. They later called the image "Photo51". In 1962, James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the double helix model of DNA, but Rosalind Franklin never had the chance to receive this prize because she died of ovarian cancer four years earlier at University of Washington. age of 37