Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose diffraction images of DNA — notably “Photograph 51” — were pivotal to Watson and Crick’s model of the double helix, and who also did foundational work on the structure of coal and of viruses. She wrote this line at nineteen, while a student at Newnham College, Cambridge, in reply to her father’s worry that science had made her one-sided. She died of ovarian cancer at just 37, before the Nobel that honoured the DNA work could recognise her contribution.