page_title: Rosalind Franklin
section_title: Birkbeck College
hierarchical_section_title: Rosalind Franklin / Career and research / Birkbeck College
caption_attribution_description: TMV Virus Author: T. Moravec Source: en:user:Xmort Virus particles were purified by PEG/NaCl precipitation and sucrose cushion ultracentrifugation. Virus was then resuspended in 20 mM PO4 buffer, pH=7.2 to final concentration 10mg/ml. Formvar coated grids were floated on drops containing virus for 30 minutes, 3 times washed in deionised water and then stained with 2% PTA for 5 minutes. ru: Вирус табачной мозаики ВТМ
context_page_description: Rosalind Elsie Franklin was an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite. Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, her contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely recognised posthumously.
  Franklin was educated at a private day school at Norland Place in West London, Lindores School for Young Ladies in Sussex, and St Paul's Girls' School, London. Then she studied the Natural Sciences Tripos at Newnham College, Cambridge, from which she graduated in 1941. Earning a research fellowship, she joined the University of Cambridge physical chemistry laboratory under Ronald George Wreyford Norrish, who disappointed her for his lack of enthusiasm. The British Coal Utilisation Research Association offered her a research position in 1942 and started her work on coals. This helped her earn a Ph.D. in 1945. She went to Paris in 1947 as a chercheur under Jacques Mering at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat, where she became an accomplished X-ray crystallographer.
context_section_description: Franklin left King's College London in mid-March 1953 for Birkbeck College, in a move that had been planned for some time and that she described (in a letter to Adrienne Weill in Paris) as "moving from a palace to the slums ... but pleasanter all the same". She was recruited by physics department chair John Desmond Bernal, a crystallographer who was a communist, known for promoting women crystallographers. Her new laboratories were housed in 21 Torrington Square, one of a pair of dilapidated and cramped Georgian houses containing several different departments; Franklin frequently took Bernal to task over the careless attitudes of some of the other laboratory staff, notably after workers in the pharmacy department flooded her first-floor laboratory with water on one occasion.
  Despite the parting words of Bernal to stop her interest in nucleic acids, she helped Gosling to finish his thesis, although she was no longer his official supervisor. Together they published the first evidence of double helix in the A form of DNA in the 25 July issue of Nature. At the end of 1954, Bernal secured funding for Franklin from the Agricultural Research Council (ARC), which enabled her to work as a senior scientist supervising her own research group. John Finch, a physics student from King's College London, subsequently joined Franklin's group, followed by Kenneth Holmes, a Cambridge graduate, in July 1955. Despite the ARC funding, Franklin wrote to Bernal that the existing facilities remained highly unsuited for conducting research "...my desk and lab are on the fourth floor, my X-ray tube in the basement, and I am responsible for the work of four people distributed over the basement, first and second floors on two different staircases."
caption: An electron micrograph of tobacco mosaic virus
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