Early Life and Education
Rosalind Franklin attended St. Paul's Girls' School, which was one of the only schools at the time to teach chemistry and physics to girls. There, Franklin demonstrated and early aptitude for math and science, an easy facility for other languages, and an ear for music. She decided she wanted to become a scientist when she was 15 years old. In 1938, she attended Cambridge University, where she majored in physical chemistry. She received her BA in 1941, received a scholarship from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Researches, and spent a year researching in R.G.W. Norrish's laboratory. Franklin had received her PhD by the time was was 26 years old, and then began working on x-ray diffraction. In France, she learned how to analyze carbons using x-ray crystallography. Soon after she finished her research on DNA, she left King's College and spent the last five years of her life studying the structure of plant viruses, the Tobacco Mosaic Virus especially. In those last five years, she published seventeen papers. Her analyses of the diffraction patterns revealed, among my other things, that the Tobacco Mosaic Virus's genetic material (RNA) was embedded in the inner wall of its protective protein shell. She used her crystallographic skills to reveal the hollow center of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus particle and to trace the helical form of its genetic material within this cylinder.
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