The Birkbeck Years

She was born on July 25, 1920, in London, the second of five children in a prominent Anglo-Jewish family. She read natural sciences at Newnham College, Cambridge, and earned her Cambridge doctorate at twenty-five for work on the porosity of coal. In 1951 she moved to John Randall's biophysics unit at King's College London. In May 1952 she made the X-ray diffraction image now known as Photo 51. In January 1953, without her knowledge, her colleague Maurice Wilkins showed Photo 51 to James Watson; Watson and Francis Crick used it to model the double-helix structure of DNA, which they published in Nature in April. Franklin died of ovarian cancer four years later, in 1958, at thirty-seven. Watson, Crick, and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize.

Ailsa Rennie's biography traces the arc through the Notting Hill childhood and the St. Paul's Girls' School physical-sciences scholarship, the Cambridge years and the Paris BCURA post-doctoral work, the King's College Birkbeck years, the Photo 51 image, the long later collaboration with Aaron Klug on tobacco-mosaic virus that the field has come to value as Franklin's most important work, and the 1958 cancer diagnosis and death.

What emerges is a portrait of an Anglo-Jewish crystallographer whose Photo 51 the Nobel committee could not consider because she was dead and whose work the post-1960s history of science has spent sixty years writing back into the record.