Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958)
Filed under the name Rosalind · April 22, 2026
Rosalind Franklin's story is, in a way, about lineage of an entirely different sort than the kind I usually spend my afternoons tracing — the lineage of an idea, and who properly gets credited as its origin. Her X-ray diffraction images were crucial to discovering the structure of DNA, work now recognized, belatedly, as making her one of the most important scientists of the twentieth century, though 'belatedly' is doing rather a lot of work in that sentence. I find myself unusually invested in this one, because I have spent a great deal of my own life quietly, comfortably credited for things I did very little to earn, simply by virtue of a name and a family line — and here is a case of exactly the opposite happening to someone who earned her contribution entirely and had to wait decades for the record to reflect it properly. It strikes me as a useful correction to sit with. Recognition, I am slowly learning, does not reliably follow the person who actually did the work, and Franklin's story is proof enough of that on its own.