Timeline Sunday 25 July 1920

Events on Sunday 25 July 1920 2

• 1920 Birth of Rosalind Franklin Born in Notting Hill, London, to a prominent Anglo-Jewish family Rosalind Franklin was born on 25 July 1920 in Notting Hill, London, the second of five children in a wealthy and socially active Anglo-Jewish family. Her father, Ellis Franklin, was a merchant banker involved in adult education and refugee relief, while her family placed a strong emphasis on public service and academic achievement. From an early age she displayed exceptional aptitude for science and mathematics, reportedly deciding on a career in science by her mid-teens despite some family skepticism about the path for a woman of her era.
• 1920 – 1958 Rosalind Franklin X-ray crystallographer whose data was pivotal to discovering the structure of DNA Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920-1958) was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose diffraction images of DNA, most famously "Photo 51", provided critical evidence for the double-helix structure published by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. Beyond DNA, she made lasting contributions to the understanding of coal and carbon structures and to the molecular structure of viruses, including tobacco mosaic virus and poliovirus. Her data was used by Watson and Crick without her knowledge or consent, and for decades her role in the DNA discovery was underappreciated. She died of ovarian cancer at 37, four years before the 1962 Nobel Prize was awarded to Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins for the work her data underpinned.