Rosalind Elsie Franklin (London 1920 – 1958) was a chemist and crystallographer, her father was against her receiving higher education but finally gave in and she obtained a PhD in chemistry and physics from Cambridge University in 1945. Author of important contributions to the understanding of the structure of DNA, she obtained the first X-ray diffraction image of the DNA double helix and also of RNA, viruses, carbon and graphite. Four years after her death, James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize for this model of the DNA double helix.
