what did rosalind franklin contribute to the discovery of dna
Who Was Rosalind Franklin?
Rosalind Franklin was a scientist whose work was instrumental in i of the greatest discoveries of modern science: the structure of Dna. However, Rosalind Franklin'south work with Deoxyribonucleic acid and her contribution to the discovery of the double helix were largely overlooked in her lifetime. James Watson and Francis Crick, together with Franklin's colleague Maurice Wilkins, received the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the construction of DNA in 1962. Rosalind Franklin was not included in the award, as a Nobel Prize tin can only be shared by three living scientists.
How Did Rosalind Franklin Contribute to the Discovery of DNA Structure?
Watson and Crick were non alone in their quest to notice the structure of Dna. The Cambridge University-based duo was in a race against the renowned scientist Linus Pauling and his colleagues at the California Establish of Technology. While Watson and Crick did not collaborate with Rosalind Franklin directly, her expertise and X-ray diffraction images of crystallized Deoxyribonucleic acid were disquisitional in helping them solve the mystery of the structure of DNA.
Watson and Crick's quest to notice DNA's structure began with their very first meeting in the summer of 1951. Their first attempt at solving the construction of DNA that fall was a failure. The Deoxyribonucleic acid construction they proposed consisted of three strands of DNA arranged in a helix, with the phosphates in the center.
Reportedly they shared their model with their Cambridge colleagues Maurice and Rosalind Franklin, and Franklin was highly critical. Whatever positive ions in the helix's core, she pointed out, would be surrounded by h2o. They would thus be neutral and therefore unable to hold the phosphates together.
Since DNA soaks up a pregnant amount of water, the phosphate groups would nigh likely be on the outside of the Dna molecule, not on the within as Watson and Crick's three-stranded helix model showed.
Unimpressed with their model, Sir William Lawrence Bragg, the manager of Cavendish Laboratory where Watson and Crick worked, put the pair to work on other projects. Crick went back to his work on proteins, and Watson was assigned to the crystallographic report of the tobacco mosaic virus. Though they were officially taken off the search for the structure of Deoxyribonucleic acid, Watson and Crick continued to discuss the problem.
In February of 1953 Linus Pauling, together with his colleague Robert B. Corey, appeared to have won the race, with the publication of their paper, 'A Proposed Structure for the Nucleic Acids.' Watson and Crick were crushed—until they realized that Pauling's recently published iii-stranded model had many of the same flaws as their discarded model and therefore could not be correct.
When Pauling'due south mistake became obvious, Bragg seized the opportunity to put Watson and Crick back to work full-fourth dimension on the question of the structure of Dna. Although Watson and Crick were enthusiastic, they were essentially stumped.
A big breakthrough came when, without Rosalind Franklin's cognition, Watson and Crick gained access to her research—a report written for the Medical Research Council on the structure of Dna, obtained by Crick via his thesis counselor Max Perutz.
Watson and Crick also got access to Franklin's 10-ray diffraction images of crystallized DNA. The most notable was mayhap the image known as 'Photo 51', which Franklin's graduate student Raymond Gosling handed over to Maurice Wilkins.
The combination of Rosalind Franklin'south images, which seemed to confirm the helical structure of Deoxyribonucleic acid, and her crystallographic calculations proved critical to helping Watson and Crick solve the mystery of DNA's structure. Watson and Crick published their findings on the double helix in a paper titled 'A Construction for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid' in April of 1953.
What Did Rosalind Franklin Do Next?
In March 1953 Rosalind Franklin left King'due south College for Birkbeck Higher, to atomic number 82 their X-ray diffraction studies on plant viruses, with a detail focus on the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). Watson and Crick published their paper outlining the double helix model the post-obit month, in Apr 1953.
Though Franklin's work proved central to helping Watson and Crick devise their model, their paper included a mere footnote acknowledging that they were 'stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature' of the unpublished work and ideas of Dr. Thou.H.F. Wilkins and Dr. R.East. Franklin and their Male monarch's Higher colleagues.
During her v years at Birkbeck College, Franklin published 17 papers on viruses. Her squad'due south pioneering work on the molecular structures of viruses laid the groundwork for structural virology.
In the final years of her career, Franklin received an increasing number of invitations to speak at conferences effectually the globe. In 1954 and 1956, she made trips to the United States, where she collaborated with other researchers and established contacts effectually the land. While in the US she was invited past the Purple Institution to create five-foot models of helical and spherical viruses for the 1958 Brussels Earth's Fair.
Unfortunately Franklin never lived to run across her models exhibited in Brussels, as her bright career was cut short past cancer. During her 1956 trip to America, she experienced the first symptoms of what would be diagnosed that autumn as ovarian cancer.
Franklin continued to work at an impressive pace through multiple surgeries and remissions. She likewise successfully applied for a three-year inquiry grant from the U.s. Public Health Service of the National Institutes of Health. It was the largest fund e'er received at Birkbeck, and she decided to utilise the funds to decipher the polio virus' crystal structure.
Sadly, Rosalind Franklin was unable to see the fruits of her work with the polio virus, as she succumbed to cancer on April 16, 1958. She was 37 years sometime.
After Franklin'south death, a Birkbeck College researcher by the proper noun of Aaron Klug took over her research grouping. Together with another researcher, John Finch, he connected Franklin's piece of work on the polio crystal structure. Their paper, published in 1959, was defended to her memory. Aaron Klug was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982, for his work on the structure of nucleic acrid-poly peptide complexes, which he started with Franklin.
Source: https://www.ancestry.com/c/dna-learning-hub/rosalind-franklin
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