In what year was Rosalind Franklin born?

Rosalind Franklin was born in 1920, on 25 July, in Notting Hill, London. She grew up in an influential British Jewish family and later became one of the twentieth century's leading X-ray crystallographers.

Franklin developed an early interest in science and attended St Paul's Girls' School in London, which had an unusually strong science curriculum for girls at the time. She went on to study natural sciences at Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating in 1941. She later completed doctoral research in physical chemistry at Cambridge, receiving her PhD in 1945.

Her career included research on coal and graphite, DNA, and viruses. She is best known for the X-ray diffraction work she carried out at King's College London, including research connected with Photo 51. After moving to Birkbeck College, she led pioneering studies of the structure of viruses.

Franklin died in 1958 at the age of 37, so she did not share the 1962 Nobel Prize awarded for work on the structure of DNA. The prize could not be awarded posthumously under the rules then in force, although her contribution is now widely recognised as fundamental.