Hello and welcome to the Witness Podcast History is told by the people who are there.

I'm Frahanahyber and today we're going back to 1951

when a young British scientist began one of the key scientific investigations of the century.

Rosalind Franklin was working at King's College London

when she produced an x-ray photograph that helped work out the 3D structure of DNA,

the molecule that holds the genetic code that underpins all life.

So what is DNA? The molecule of life is in fact a long chain of 3 billion smaller ones. They're wound up tightly into almost

every cell inside us and they contain the instructions to build and repair the entire

human body. A brilliant but prickly scientist Rosalind Franklin took the crucial photo of the molecule that helped her rivals get their first.

Rosalind Franklin was born in London in 1920 into a modern thinking wealthy Jewish family. I've been speaking to Jennifer

Glyn, Rosalin Franklin's younger sister. It was a very discussing sort of household I think.

Rosalind enjoyed arguments not aggressively in any way but she liked

discussing things. So she was someone who spoke her mind would you say even from a young age?

Certainly and my mother wrote a sort of memory of her pointing out that she was

always very logical and very exact and always wanted to know even as a small child would never accept a belief or

statement for which no reason or proof could be produced. I think that's the site of

a scientist really.

With her scientific talent evident at an early age, Rosalind went to Cambridge in 1938 to study chemistry.

After graduation, she joined the war effort, carrying out research to try to make gas masks more effective.

In 1951 she went to work at King's College London,

but before that she spent several years in France at the National Chemical Research Laboratory in Paris,

where she became an expert in X-ray crystallography.

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