We are finishing the third issue of Hedy Magazine, so we will be sharing a selection of the second issue articles in the blog these days! Did you miss any of them? This is an article about Rosalind Franklin by Gloria Estevan, illustration by Laura Gomez!

If you don’t have a scientific background, the name might not ring a bell. The discovery of the shape of the DNA molecule —the famous double helix— goes hand in hand with the names Watson & Crick. So who was this Ms Franklin? Read on for a tale of scientific scandal and scholarly spite! Also, misogyny.

A graduate in the natural sciences from Cambridge in 1941, Franklin was then awarded a research scholarship to spend a year doing graduate work in R. G. W. Norrish’s lab — which she, apparently, spent being mostly ignored probably because of her two X chromosomes.

Fortunately for her and for humankind as a whole, she was offered a job as a research assistant by the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, started studying coal, earned her PhD, and in 1947 moved to Paris to learn about the field of X-ray crystallography — which essentially consists in bouncing X-rays off a molecule to see in what directions they are diffracted by atoms and in turn figure out their molecular structure. Franklin spent several years in Paris and became quite an accomplished experimental diffraction researcher.

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