Rosalind Franklin

Google is celebrating the 93rd birthday of molecular biologist Rosalind Franklin today with a homepage doodle that pays homage to her contributions to DNA research.

Franklin played a large role in uncovering the structure of DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, though her contributions are controversial. Two other researchers actually beat her to publishing data about the effort, using one of her X-ray photographs of DNA. The duo - along with Franklin's co-worker Maurice Wilkins - eventually won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for their work, several years after Franklin's death.

Franklin had an interest in science from an early age, but her father was not supportive of higher education for women, forcing Franklin to secure tuition money for Cambridge University from an aunt. During World War II, she focused on "the nature of coal and charcoal and how to use them most efficiently," PBS said, which helped launch the field of high-strength carbon fibers.

Rosalind Franklin doodle

Once the war ended, Franklin shifted her work to x-ray diffraction, or using x-rays to create images of crystallized solids. After a three-year stint in France, she took a position at King's College in London to work on DNA research. But clashes with Wilkins, the lab's No. 2, slowed their progress.

"Between 1951 and 1953 Rosalind Franklin came very close to solving the DNA structure. She was beaten to publication by Crick and Watson in part because of the friction between Wilkins and herself," according to the San Diego Supercomputer Center. "At one point, Wilkins showed Watson one of Franklin's crystallographic portraits of DNA. When he saw the picture, the solution became apparent to him, and the results went into an article in Nature almost immediately, [though] Franklin's work did appear as a supporting article in the same issue of the journal."

Unfortunately, Franklin never truly got to see how far-reaching her work would become. She died at age 37 from ovarian cancer in 1958.
