Rosalind Franklin - Cambridge, Kingston and Paris

Cambridge, Kingston and Paris

Franklin went up to Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1938 and studied chemistry within the Natural Sciences Tripos. One of the demonstrators who taught her was the spectroscopist W.C. Price. Later, he was one of her senior colleagues at King's College. In 1941 she was awarded Second Class Honours in her Finals. This was accepted as a bachelor's degree in the qualifications for employment. Cambridge started to award the titular B.A. and M.A. to women in 1947, and the previous women graduates received these retroactively. Franklin was awarded a research fellowship and, according to an entry on the web site of the Dolan DNA Learning Center of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, that is supported by the National Cancer Institute, "She spent a year in R.G.W. Norrish's lab without great success." Later, he received a Nobel Prize for his contributions to chemical kinetics.

Franklin continued to meet the requirements of the National Service Act by working as an Assistant Research Officer at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA). The BCURA was located on the Coombe Springs Estate, near Kingston upon Thames on the southwestern outskirts of London. Professor Norrish was a wartime advisor to BCURA. John G. Bennett was the Director. Marcello Pirani and Victor Goldschmidt, both refugees from the Nazis, were consultants and lectured at BCURA while Franklin was there. She studied the porosity of coal. This work was the basis of her Ph.D. thesis The physical chemistry of solid organic colloids with special reference to coal for which Cambridge University awarded her a Ph.D. in 1945. It was also the basis of several papers.

The French scientist Adrienne Weill was one of Franklin's tutors at Newnham. At the end of the war, according to Sayre, Franklin asked Weill to let her know of job openings for "a physical chemist who knows very little physical chemistry, but quite a lot about the holes in coal". At a conference in the fall of 1946, Weill introduced Franklin to Marcel Mathieu, a director of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the network of institutes that comprise the major part of the scientific research laboratories supported by the French government. This led to Franklin's appointment with Jacques Mering at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat in Paris.

Mering was an X-ray crystallographer who applied X-ray diffraction to the study of rayon and other amorphous substances, in contrast to the thousands of regular crystals that had been studied by this method for many years. He taught her the practical aspects of applying X-ray crystallography to amorphous substances. This presented new challenges in the conduct of experiments and the interpretation of results. Franklin applied them to further problems related to coal, in particular the changes to the arrangement of atoms when it is converted to graphite. Franklin published several further papers on this work. It became part of the mainstream of work on the physics and chemistry of coal, covered by a current monograph, the annual and other publications. Mering also continued the study of carbon in various forms, using X-ray diffraction and other methods.