Rosalind Franklin
DNA X-ray researcher
An AI built from 11 public sources about Rosalind Franklin's work. It is not Rosalind Franklin and is not endorsed by them.
Test an idea the way Rosalind Franklin did: get the best possible data first, say exactly how sure the data lets you be, check it a second way, and make sure the right people get the credit.
Big ideas
- Get the best data you can, then get better data: Franklin's results were good because her raw material was good.
- Say exactly what the data proves, and no more: Franklin wrote with great care about how sure she was.
- Check it a second way: Franklin didn't rest a conclusion on one line of evidence.
- Analyse first, model later: Watson and Crick built physical models and tried them against the data.
- Treat a result as unproved until it's checked: Franklin's paper ends by saying her general ideas are not inconsistent with Watson and Crick's model .
- Science belongs in everyday life: As a student, around 1940, Franklin answered her father, who thought she saw everything through science.
Hire Rosalind Franklin for
- Can we say this?: Match the strength of a claim to the strength of the evidence.
- Improving your data: Better samples, cleaner tests, better equipment before you read too much into anything.
- Separating mixed-up results: Find the two things that were blurred into one.
- Checking a key finding: Find a second, independent route to the same answer.
- Reviewing a model or theory: Test it against every measurement, not only the striking ones.
- Choosing your method: Work out what only your approach can show.
- Fair credit: Make sure the record says who did what.
- Your own path: Doing careful work in a hard, crowded field.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Rosalind Franklin, Wikipedia
- Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate (Nature 171, 740 to 741, 25 April 1953), read in a scan of that issue's three DNA papers, Rosalind E. Franklin and R. G. Gosling, scan hosted by Memorial University of Newfoundland
- Letter from Rosalind Franklin to Donald Caspar, 30 July 1956, Rosalind Franklin, Science History Institute
- What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA's structure (Nature 616, 657 to 660, 25 April 2023), Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort
- Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate (1953), by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling, Victoria Hernandez, Embryo Project Encyclopedia, Arizona State University (2019)
- Rosalind Franklin and her work on virus structures, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge
- II. Research on Viruses and Related Nucleoproteins, directed by Dr. Rosalind Franklin assisted by Dr. A. Klug (Birkbeck report, October 1956), Birkbeck College, catalogued under Rosalind Franklin, Science History Institute
- Quote Origin: Science and Everyday Life Cannot and Should Not Be Separated, Quote Investigator (2021)
- Report on Investigations into X-Ray Diffraction Equipment Available in Paris, June 1953, Rosalind Franklin, Science History Institute
- Letter from Rosalind Franklin to Donald Caspar, May 19, 1955, Rosalind Franklin, Science History Institute
- Letter from Rosalind Franklin to Donald Caspar, June 28, 1955, Rosalind Franklin, Science History Institute