The Royal Mint will soon issue a commemorative 50p coin to commemorate scientist Rosalind Franklin. She discovered things related to DNA. The coin will depict Photograph 51. It will be the second release in the Innovators in Science series.
The issue marks the centenary of Rosalind Franklin’s birth.
Franklin, born in July 25, 1920, in London, showed an early interest in science and trained as a chemist, becoming an expert on coal and other carbon-based materials. She earned a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1945. She then worked in Paris, developing skills at using X-ray crystallography to study crystalline structures, before moving to King’s College London, where Maurice Wilkins had been studying the molecular structure of DNA. Franklin took up DNA studies and produced exceptional X-ray images. She came close to determining DNA’s double-helix structure, but didn’t get it quite right.
Meanwhile James Watson, who had been following her research, was shown one of her X-ray images by Wilkins in early 1953, enabling Watson and Francis Crick to deduce the correct DNA architecture. Franklin saw that the Watson-Crick model was consistent with her work, but didn’t immediately accept that the model would ultimately turn out to be right in detail. She died in 1958, and so was not eligible for the Nobel Prize, awarded four years later to Watson and Crick. Wilkins also shared the prize, but there is no doubt that had she still been alive, Franklin would have deserved it more than he did.
Expect next year we will see Charles Babbage appear as an issue would mark the 150th anniversary of his death.
