Franklin House

Franklin House's charity, the British Heart Foundation, is working to create a better future for all those with heart disease now and in the future.

Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920 - 1958) was a British biophysicist, physicist, chemist, biologist and X-ray crystallographer who made important contributions to the understanding of the structure of DNA. She is still best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA. Her data, according to Francis Crick, was "the data we actually used” to formulate Crick and Watson's 1953 hypothesis regarding the structure of DNA. The importance of her role in this major scientific breakthrough was not revealed until Watson wrote his personal account, "The Double Helix", in 1968 which inspired several people to investigate DNA history and Franklin's contribution. After finishing her DNA work, Franklin led pioneering work on the tobacco mosaic and polio viruses.
She died at the age of 37 from complications arising from ovarian cancer.