BIOLOGY
Rosalind Elsie Franklin
Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born at 5 Pembridge Place, Kensington, London, England on the 25th July,1920 and died of cancer on the 16th April,1958. She was buried at Willesden Cemetery, London. She was the sixth child of Ellis Franklin and Muriel Waley. The Franklins arrived in England from Breslau, Silesia in 1763 under the family name of Fraenkel and became a prominent family of jewish bankers and intellectuals. Rosalind did not marry. Her father taught electricity, magnetism and the history of the Great War in the evenings at The Working Men’s College, Crowndale Road, near King’s Cross Station, where he later became vice principal. She was educated first at Norland Place, a co-educational private day school on Holland Park Avenue, before going to Lindores School for Young Ladies and then to St Paul’s Girls school, London. Her father refused to pay for her to go up to Cambridge after she passed the entrance examination in 1938 as he did not approve of university education for women and an aunt stepped in and paid the fees. In 1938 she went to Newnham college, Cambridge one of two women’s colleges and passed her finals in 1941, but was only awarded a degree titular in name, as women were not entitled to degrees BA Cantab. from Cambridge at this time. She then held a graduate fellowship for a year, but resigned to work for the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, where she worked on carbon and graphite microstructures. This was the basis for her Ph.D. focusing on the nature of coal and charcoal and how to use them most efficiently, graduating in 1945 from Cambridge university. © BA
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