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Rosalind Franklin

Crystallographer who obtained Photo 51, key to deciphering the structure of DNA.

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Rosalind Franklin

Crystallographer who obtained Photo 51, key to deciphering the structure of DNA.

She was a British scientist, born in 1920 and deceased in 1958, specialized in X-ray crystallography. She worked at King's College London, where she investigated the structure of biological macromolecules.

Her X-ray diffraction photographs, obtained with a technique she perfected in the early 1950s, provided decisive experimental data on the helical structure of DNA. Her work is now recognized as an essential contribution to the double helix model, although she was not given proper credit at the time.

The video recounts that Franklin perfected the X-ray diffraction technique until she achieved, after 100 hours of radiation exposure, Photo 51, and that she refused to publish until she finished her calculations. It notes that her colleague Maurice Wilkins showed the photograph without her permission to James Watson, that the rigor of the experiment cost her her life, as she died of cancer at 37, and that her colleagues' fame was built on data she never knew had been stolen from her.

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