The First Lady of DNA

The story of Rosalind Franklin never ceases to fascinate, and the publication of her biography as told by Brenda Maddox is indeed pertinent: celebrating 50 years of the most illuminating discovery in life sciences, namely the revelation of the structure of DNA. In the 25th of April 1953 issue of Nature, three consecutive short papers ushered in a new era in biology by unveiling an ingenious model of the DNA structure, together with the X-ray diffraction data crucial for its formulation.

The best known of the three papers is the one by James Watson and Francis Crick, who both then worked at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University. Watson and Crick proposed that DNA forms a right-handed helix composed of two anti-parallel DNA strands, which are kept together by specific hydrogen bonds between adenines and thymines and between guanines and cytosines. The notion of complementarity was born, and it immediately suggested a conceptually simple mechanism for copying genetic information over generations of cells and organisms.

The other two papers presented X-ray data obtained by two research groups at King’s College, London, one led by Maurice Wilkins and the other by Rosalind Franklin. It was Wilkins who initiated the X-ray diffraction studies of DNA fibres and who obtained the first promising diffractograms suggesting that DNA could be helical.

However, it required the experience and experimental skills of Franklin to obtain high-quality X-ray diffractograms that contained the definitive information that Watson and Crick needed to propose their famous DNA model.

(via ikenbot)