March  28, 2021

Episode : Episode 2: Rosalind Franklin

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00:00:00 - Hello everyone, and welcome to this second episode of the Stan Mee Project podcast series.

00:00:09 - I'm your host, Jessie Doe, and today we'll be taking a look at more amazing women in

00:00:14 - STEM careers who have contributed to society and have to overcome incredible challenges.

00:00:20 - In today's episode, we'll be featuring Rosalind Elise Franklin, one of the pioneering molecular biologists in the 1900s and her contributions into the discovery of DNA.

00:00:31 - There's probably no other weapon scientist with as much controversy surrounding her life as the work of Rosalind Franklin. Franklin was responsible for much of the research and discovery work that led to the understanding and structure of deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA.

00:00:48 - The story of DNA is a tale of competition and intrigue, one way told by James Watson's book, The Double Helix, and quite another in Ann Sarri's study,

00:00:58 - Rosalind Franklin and DNA. Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins received a Nobel prize for the Double Helix model of DNA in 1962, four years after Franklin's death at age 37 from ovarian cancer. Now the history of Rosalind Franklin is an interesting one because she was one of the main contributors for the discovery of DNA, yet she was never really given any credibility towards her work. She wasn't given a Nobel Prize, and even when she was alive, she had difficulty being respected by some of her peers, such as by Maurice Wilkins. Beginning with Franklin's early years, she actually excelled at science and attended one of the few girls schools in London that taught physics and chemistry. When she was 15, she decided to become a scientist.

00:01:48 - Her father was decidedly against her higher education for women and wanted Rosalind to be a social worker. I feel like at this time I should point out that a lot of women in science were actually discouraged from pursuing these careers and this was actually stunning back from the Victorian era in the 1800s.

00:02:06 - I kind of talked about this a little bit with Margaret Huggins and her experiences going to school and the challenges that she had to overcome as well.

00:02:14 - During those times it wasn't really common for women to actually be pursuing STEM careers and because it wasn't socially acceptable at the time it was very difficult for women to find success if they did go to school and if they were able to find careers as scientists. Fortunately though in 1938 Rosalind Flanklin was able to enroll at Newham College, Cambridge graduating in 1941.

00:02:39 - She held a Graduate Fellowship for a year, but quit in 1942 to work at the British Coal

00:02:45 - Utilization Research Association, where she made fundamental studies of carbon and graphite microstructures. This work was the basis of her doctorate in physical chemistry, which she earned from Cambridge University in 1945. After Cambridge, she spent three productive years in Paris between 1947 and 1950, where she would actually learn x-ray diffraction techniques and this would actually become the basis of unravelling the structure of DNA as this laboratory technique would prove vital in discovering that. In 1951 she returned to England as a research associate in John Randall's laboratory at King's College London.

00:03:25 - It was at this point in time where Rosalind Franklin would actually cross paths with Maurice

00:03:31 - Wilkins in Randall's lab. She and Wilkins led separate research groups and had separate projects, although both were concerned with DNA. When Randall gave Franklin responsibility for her DNA project, no one had worked on it for months. Initially,

00:03:48 - Maurice Wilkins had technically begun investigating the structure of DNA, but had come to a standstill, and when Rosalind Franklin had come into the laboratory, Wilkins wasn't there at the time, and so Rosalind Franklin just began research on her own. However, the two got out to a really rocky start from when he returned from his trip he misunderstood her position and assumed her role as a technical assistant even though she was actually a fellow researcher. While his mistake was acknowledged at the time it was actually never overcome and Franklin would actually be exposed to several instances of sexism and bigotry in the workplace. Given the current climate of women in the industry at the time it wasn't uncommon for Rosalind Franklin and other women to experience these kinds of encounters. But Franklin persisted on a DNA project. With the help of one of her Ph.D. students, she was actually able to capture an X-ray photograph of DNA.

00:04:46 - This was the first instance that anyone was able to really take a photograph of this structure of DNA, and Rosalind Franklin had just accomplished this using X-ray diffraction.

00:04:57 - Between 1951 and 1953, Rosen and Franklin came very close to solving this DNA structure.

00:05:05 - With the X-ray photograph that Franklin had produced, she was actually able to deduce the basic dimensions of the crystallized DNA strand and hypothesized that the denser regions of the structure, aka its helices, consisted of phosphate groups. However, she was beaten to publication by Watson and Crick in part because of the friction between Wilkins and herself.

00:05:29 - At one point, Wilkins showed Watson one of Franklin's crystallographic portraits of DNA, and when he saw the picture the solution became pretty clear to him and the results went on to an article in Nature almost immediately.

00:05:43 - Franklin's work did appear as a supporting article in the same issue of the journal.

00:05:47 - A debate about the amount of credit due to Franklin continues.

00:05:51 - Was it fair that Rosalind Franklin was only given a supportive role even though she had actually been the first scientist to photograph DNA?

00:06:00 - And yet, Rosalind Franklin was not eligible to win a Nobel Prize.

00:06:05 - However, this is likely due to the result of the Nobel Prize not being given to scientists who have already passed.

00:06:13 - Regardless, Rosalind Franklin did experience many instances of sexism in the workplace and often resulted in many arguments with her peer, Maurice Wilkins.

00:06:25 - Because of the relationship Wilkins had with Watson and Crick, it was often difficult for

00:06:30 - Rosalind Franklin to even collaborate with the other two scientists as well.

00:06:34 - This just highlights some of the inequalities that exist between women and men in STEM careers.

00:06:40 - What her opportunities have been different as she were male, which she had been given support from her family, from her colleagues, which she had been given more recognition.

00:06:50 - Regardless of these things, what is clear is that she did have a meaningful role in learning the structure of DNA and that she was a scientist of a first rank. Franklin moved to J.D. Brunel's lab at Burbank College, where she did very fruitful work on the tobacco mosaic virus, and she also began working on a polio virus. However, of the summer of 1956, Rosalind

00:07:13 - Franklin became ill with cancer and she died less than two years later. Nowadays, Rosalind Franklin is considered to be one of the major contributors of the discovery of genetic DNA and would lay down the grounds for future molecular biologists. That concludes today's episode featuring Rosalind

00:07:32 - Franklin. We hope you've enjoyed the episode and we hope that you stay tuned for future ones.

00:07:37 - Thank you so much and take care.

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