Rosalind Elsie Franklin (25 July 1920 - 16 April 1958) was an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer who made contributions to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), 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. Born to a prominent British Jewish family, 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.

Franklin went to Newnham College, Cambridge in 1938 and studied chemistry within the Natural Sciences Tripos. There she met the spectroscopist Bill Price, who worked with her as a laboratory demonstrator and who later became one of her senior colleagues at King's College London. In 1941, she was awarded second-class honours from her final exams. The distinction was accepted as a bachelor's degree in qualifications for employment. Cambridge began awarding titular B.A. and M.A. degrees to women from 1947, and the previous women graduates retroactively received these. In her last year at Cambridge, she met a French refugee Adrienne Weill, a former student of Marie Curie, who had a huge influence on her life and career and helped her to improve her spoken French.  Franklin was awarded a research fellowship at Newnham College, with which she joined the physical chemistry laboratory of the University of Cambridge to work under Ronald Norrish, who later won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In her one year of work there, she did not have much success. As described by his biographer, Norrish was "obstinate and almost perverse in argument, overbearing and sensitive to criticism". He could not decide for her what to work upon, and at that time was succumbing to heavy drinking. Franklin wrote that he made her despise him completely. Resigning from Norrish's Lab, she fulfilled the requirements of the National Service Acts by working as an assistant research officer at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA) in 1942. The BCURA was located on the Coombe Springs Estate near Kingston upon Thames near the southwestern boundary of London. Norrish acted as advisor to the military at BCURA. John G. Bennett was the director. Marcello Pirani and Victor Goldschmidt, both refugees from the Nazis, were consultants and lectured at BCURA while Franklin worked there. During her BCURA research, she stayed at Adrienne Weill's boarding house in Cambridge until her cousin Irene Franklin asked to join her in a vacated house of her uncle in Putney. With Irene, she volunteered as an Air Raid Warden and regularly made patrols to see the welfare of people during air raids.  She studied the porosity of coal using helium to determine its density. Through this, she discovered the relationship between the fine constrictions in the pores of coals and the permeability of the porous space. By concluding that substances were expelled in order of molecular size as temperature increased, she helped classify coals and accurately predict their performance for fuel purposes and for production of wartime devices such as gas masks. This work was the basis of her Ph.D. thesis The physical chemistry of solid organic colloids with special reference to coal for which the University of Cambridge University awarded her a Ph.D. in 1945. It was also the basis of several papers.

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