On July 22, 1922, Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born in Notting Hill, London — the second of five children of a prominent Anglo-Jewish banking family. Her father believed women should not attend university. Her aunt endowed a scholarship for women at Newnham College, Cambridge. Rosalind attended Cambridge.

She completed her doctorate at Cambridge in 1945, studying the microstructure of coal — practical wartime research that produced methods for determining coal's porosity and predicting its commercial performance. She was so good at X-ray crystallography that the Coal Research Laboratory in France, where she worked from 1947 to 1950, built one of Europe's best crystallography laboratories around her techniques.

She came to King's College London in 1951 to apply those techniques to DNA. The structure she was examining was not peripheral to the problem — it was the problem. Her Photo 51, taken in May 1952, is one of the most consequential scientific images ever made: an X-ray diffraction image of a B-form DNA fiber that directly reveals the helical structure.

James Watson saw it without her knowledge or consent, shown by her colleague Maurice Wilkins. Watson and Crick's February 1953 paper relied on her measurements and her image. When the Nobel Prize was awarded in 1962 — posthumously ineligible as she had died of ovarian cancer in 1958 — it went to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins.