At which laboratory at Birkbeck College did Rosalind Franklin work on viruses?

Rosalind Franklin worked on viruses in the Crystallography Laboratory at Birkbeck College. She moved there in March 1953 after leaving King’s College London, where her research had focused on DNA.

At Birkbeck, Franklin joined the research environment created by crystallographer J. D. Bernal. She applied X-ray crystallography to plant viruses, especially tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), an RNA virus that infects tobacco plants. Her team studied the virus’s helical structure and the arrangement of its protein coat and RNA.

Franklin collaborated closely with Aaron Klug, Donald Caspar, John Finch, and Kenneth Holmes. Their work helped show how RNA lies within TMV and contributed to later structural biology. She also began investigating polio virus, but her illness prevented her from completing that project. The Cavendish Laboratory, by contrast, was associated with James Watson and Francis Crick’s work in Cambridge, not Franklin’s Birkbeck virus research.