Rosalind Franklin
Saanvi Kunisetty
I first came to know about Rosalind Franklin in my seventh grade biology class, when we learnt that though Watson and Crick were first noted to have developed the DNA double-helix structure, it was actually Rosalind Franklin's research they took without permission in order to come up with their conjecture. I thought her to be an amazingly talented and bold woman scientist of her time. And though Rosalind Franklin is best known for her biological contributions in relation to DNA structure, her earlier years were marked with great findings about coal, graphite, and other carbon-based materials.
In 1942, Franklin joined the British Coal Utilization Research Association (CURA), where she was assigned with the task of studying the structure of coal through properties such as density and porosity. Through this, she became immensely intrigued by the micropores, or poles on a finer microscopic scale, that were present throughout coal. Through utilizing the Archimedes liquid displacement method, the ‘lump’ density, or the density of a material with its pores, could be calculated. The true density was then calculated through a much more complicated method involving gas displacement using helium, and then compared to the ‘lump’ density. When this was attempted with other larger gas molecules, such as benzene and hexane. It was discovered that these molecules were unable to pass through due to their size, establishing what was probably the first ‘molecular sieve’ behavior in carbon-based materials. Franklin’s findings paved the way for the use of carbon-based molecular sieves in many industries to separate inorganic gases, hydrocarbons, and small polar molecules. It also influenced her future findings and density determinations in DNA.
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