Rosalind Franklin Biography Essay

Rosalind Franklin was born the second of five children on July 25, 1920 in Notting Hill, London, England. Her parents were Muriel and Ellis Franklin. She was born into a Jewish family. Her family lived in wealthy and educated West London society. Her mother had aspirations to go to college, however was unable to as her mother did not allow it. Muriel not able to go to college made her want her children to have a good education. Her father, Ellis, was a opinionated and strict individual. He aspired to attend college too, but after his service in infantry during World War I he began his career in banking, at Keyser bank. Ellis also volunteered at Working Men’s College and taught classes at the college. Franklin was described as an intelligent, lively, and unruly child. When Franklin was young she had an infection that left her weak. Her parents forced her into a schedule of forced naps and rest. As young as nine years old Franklin was sent to boarding school, Lindores School for Young Ladies. At the age of eleven Franklin was cured of her illness and brought home to London and enrolled in St. Paul’s School for Girls, where she discovered her love for
She joined Jacques Mering and his team of researchers at one of the French government’s laboratories, the Central State Chemistry Laboratories. Mering was using x-ray crystallography, sometimes called x-ray diffraction, to study amorphous solids. Amorphous solids have no regular crystalline structure, for example, coal is an amorphous solid. Franklin began using x-ray diffraction to study the atomic structure of coal. Franklin became an expert in x-ray crystallography techniques. This type of work required excellent mathematical skills, which were all done by hand. She was the first scientist to see that organic chemicals have common characteristics and was able to divide them into two