Rosalind Franklin and DNA Rosalind Franklin and DNA Rosalind Franklin and DNA is a biography of an English chemist Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) written by her American friend Anne Sayre in 1975. Franklin was a physical chemist who made pivotal research in the discovery of the structure of DNA, known as "the most important discovery" in biology. DNA itself had become "life's most famous molecule". While working at the King's College London in 1951, she discovered two types of DNA called A-DNA and B-DNA. Her X-ray images of DNA indicated helical structure. Her X-ray image of B-DNA (called Photo 51) taken in 1952 became the
Francis Crick 1953, Crick's thesis advisor, Max Perutz, gave Crick a copy of a report written for a Medical Research Council biophysics committee visit to King's in December 1952, containing data from the King's group, including some of Franklin's crystallographic calculations. Franklin was unaware that photograph 51 and other information had been shared with Crick and Watson. She wrote a series of three draft manuscripts, two of which included a double helical DNA backbone. Her two A form manuscripts reached Acta Crystallographica in Copenhagen on 6 March 1953, one day before Crick and Watson had completed their model. The X-ray diffraction images