Rosalind Franklin in Paris. Courtesy Vittorio Luzzati. Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) A lot has been said and written about Rosalind Franklin and her role in the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA. The daughter of a prominent Anglo-Jewish family, she studied chemistry at Cambridge University. After earning her Ph.D. she worked at Laboratoire Centrale des Services Chimiques de l’Etat in Paris, where she learned X-ray crystallography. An excellent experimentalist, she then moved back to England to work at King’s College in London. At King’s College Franklin took impeccable X-ray crystallographic images of DNA, better than any in the hands of other researchers at the time. Her coworker Maurice Wilkins showed the images to James Watson and Francis Crick of Cambridge, unbeknownst to Franklin. The images led Watson and Crick to develop their double-helical model of DNA. Much controversy has surrounded this event, especially with regard to how much credit is due Franklin in the discovery. In any case, she could not share in the recognition Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received in winning the 1962 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, as she died tragically of ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of 37.