The disease and machismo of the 1950s deprived him of the Nobel Prize in Medicine that was awarded to his male counterparts in 1962. Its discovery was fundamental evidence for the development of biology, genetics and applied medicine.
At 15 he decided to dedicate his life to science, despite not having the support of his father or society as a whole. However, he graduated in biophysics at age 21 from the University of Cambridge (UK) and spent seven years in Paris researching X-ray diffraction techniques. In 1951 she joined King’s College London as a researcher, where she began working on a DNA project that had been parked for months.
His co-worker’s name was Maurice Wilkins, and he had friction with him due to the situation of contempt that female scientists faced in university laboratories. In 1953 he took his famous 51 photograph in which he used X-ray diffraction to capture the double helix structure of DNA. Wilkins showed the capture without the biologist’s consent to scientists James Watson and Francis Crick, who used it to confirm their hypotheses and publish the finding two years later in the journal Nature. In 1962, the three scientists received the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Although Rosalind’s contribution to the work was mentioned in the article, it was no greater than that of a mere technical assistant and it was not until decades later that she became a key role in the investigation. Rosalind devoted the last years of her life to pioneering research related to the tobacco mosaic virus and poliovirus. He finally died in 1958 from cancer caused by repeated exposures to radiation in his experiments . The scientist sacrificed her life to discover the secret of life.
