Scienze e Viaggi

Rosalind Franklin

In the 1963 on the platform for the delivery of the Nobel prize for the discovery of the structure of the DNA it missed a scientist whose contribution has been fundamental: this researcher was Rosalind Franklin. Prematurely dead to the 37 years old age for a tumor to the ovaries, she had conducted all the experiments what had allowed to photograph with X rays the structure of the DNA, and whose interpretation allowed to deduce its three dimensional structure.

Rosalind Franklin confronted an hostile environment to the women,that hindered her career.But her strong spirit of indipendence and her indisputable intelligence have allowed her to impose however in the history of the science and now it's necessary an historical revaluation of her job.

Rosalind Franklin was 33 years old in February of 1953, when on her notebook of note she wrote that :"the DNA is composed by two separate chains", two weeks later Crick and Watson built their famous model of the structure of the DNA, in the laboratory of Cavendish in Cambridge.

The "instructions" to build the model reached the two scientists for transverse streets, through which they knew the Franklin's, never published.

In fact Wilkins, who collaborated with the Franklin, made by Franklin without to image that by this information the two scientists would have been able to inflict the structure of the DNA, also helped by the reading of the volume of Max Perutz that summarized the works of researchers like Franklin.

Watson,in his famous book "the double helix"(1968), it allows to glimpse the difficulties that the scientists has to face for being able to decidedly continue his own seaches in the world of the hostile English search to the female kind in that years despite his curriculum scientific pits excellent.

What she had to face,united to the premature death that has not allowed her to receive the right recognition,turned her to femminist in the sciences.

But during her shortlife,she was on good terms with Watson and Crick.lk