Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born in London on 25 July 1920 into a prominent Jewish family. She studied chemistry at Cambridge and during the Second World War earned a doctorate for research on coal. From 1947 to 1950 she worked in Paris, where she mastered X-ray crystallography. In 1951 she joined King's College London to study DNA. With her student Raymond Gosling she obtained sharp X-ray diffraction images of DNA fibres, including the image known as Photo 51 (1952), and showed that DNA exists in two forms and that its phosphate backbone lies on the outside. Without her knowledge, her colleague Maurice Wilkins showed Photo 51 to James Watson, and her unpublished data reached Francis Crick through a research report. These helped Watson and Crick build their double-helix model, published in Nature on 25 April 1953, alongside papers from Wilkins's group and from Franklin and Gosling. At Birkbeck College she then led important work on the structure of viruses. She died of ovarian cancer on 16 April 1958, aged 37. The 1962 Nobel Prize went to Watson, Crick and Wilkins; the prize is not awarded posthumously.

Faith: Born into a Jewish family; she did not hold religious faith. Source: Wikipedia

See also: Marie Curie · Charles Darwin