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 Britain as planned in May 1952. As it was, his political activities caused his travel to be restricted by the United States government and he did not visit the UK until later, at which point he met none of the DNA researchers in England. At any rate he was preoccupied with proteins at the time, not DNA. Watson and Crick were not officially working on DNA. Crick was writing his Ph.D. thesis; Watson also had other work such as trying to obtain crystals of myoglobin for X-ray diffraction experiments. In 1952, Watson performed X-ray diffraction on tobacco mosaic virus and