Rosalind Elsie Franklin

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Rosalind Elsie Franklin

Eager to apply Franklin's x-ray diffraction skills to the problem of DNA structure, Randall had lured her to his lab with a Turner Newall Research Fellowship and the promise that Franklin would be working on one of the more pressing research problems of the era--puzzling out the structure and function of DNA. When Franklin arrived at Randall’s laboratory, she began working with Raymond Gosling, a student who had been attempting to capture pictures of the elusive DNA. Another scientist on the team, Maurice Wilkins, was already involved in the project assigned to Franklin. Wilkins and Franklin immediately had a personality conflict. But the animosity between the two did not detract Franklin from her work, and shortly after arriving at King's, she started x-raying DNA fibers that Wilkins had obtained from a Swiss investigator.
Within a few months of joining Randall's team, Franklin gave a talk describing preliminary pictures she had obtained of the DNA as it transformed from a crystalline form, or A pattern, to a wet form, or B pattern, through an increase in relative humidity. The pictures showed, she suggested, that phosphate groups might lie outside the molecule. In the audience that November day sat James Watson, a twenty-four-year-old American who was also working on unraveling the molecular structure of DNA. Working with Francis Crick at Cambridge, Watson was skeptical of Franklin's refusal to set aside hard crystallographic data in favor of model building. Perhaps for that reason, Franklin remained publicly scornful of the notion gradually gaining adherents that the DNA molecule had a helical structure. In her unpublished reports, however, Franklin suggested the probability that the B form of DNA exhibited such a structure, as did, perhaps, the A form.
In 1952, Franklin and Gosling continued to investigate DNA39s A pattern. By January 1953, Franklin had started model-building,...