Editing Rosalind Franklin (section)

==Early life==
Franklin was born in 50 Chepstow Villas,<ref>{{cite web |title=Name of Firm: A. Keyser & Co. |url=https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/32622/supplement/1702/data.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/32622/supplement/1702/data.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live |date=22 February 1922 |website=The Gazette |access-date=21 November 2014}}</ref> [[Notting Hill]], London, into an affluent and influential [[British Jewish]] family.<ref name="nlm-bio" /><ref>{{cite web |title=Rosalind Franklin |url=http://www.londonremembers.com/subjects/rosalind-franklin |publisher=London Remembers |access-date=21 November 2014}}</ref><ref>GRO Register of Births: SEP 1920 1a 250 KENSINGTON – Rosalind E. Franklin, mmn = Waley</ref>

===Family===
Franklin's father, [[Ellis Arthur Franklin]] (1894–1964), was a politically liberal London [[merchant banker]] who taught at the city's [[Working Men's College]], and her mother was Muriel Frances Waley (1894–1976). Rosalind was the elder daughter and the second child in the family of five children. David (1919–1986) was the eldest brother while [[Colin Franklin (bibliographer)|Colin]] (1923–2020), [[Roland Franklin|Roland]] (1926–2024), and Jenifer (born 1929) were her younger siblings.<ref name="Glynn, p.1">Glynn, p. 1.</ref>

Franklin's paternal great-uncle was [[Herbert Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel|Herbert Samuel]] (later Viscount Samuel), who was the [[Home Secretary]] in 1916 and the first practising Jew to serve in the [[British Cabinet]].<ref name="Samuel">Maddox, p. 7.</ref> Her aunt, Helen Caroline Franklin, known in the family as Mamie, was married to [[Norman de Mattos Bentwich]], who was the [[Attorney General]] in the [[Mandatory Palestine|British Mandate of Palestine]].<ref>Segev p.</ref> Helen was active in trade union organisation and the [[women's suffrage movement]] and was later a member of the [[London County Council]].<ref name="p31">{{cite book|last=Sayre|first=A.|title=Rosalind Franklin and DNA|year=1975|publisher=Norton|location=New York|isbn=0-393-07493-5|oclc=1324379|page=[https://archive.org/details/rosalindfranklin00anne/page/31 31]|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=rM6_QgAACAAJ}}</ref><ref name="p40">Maddox, p. 40.</ref> Franklin's uncle, [[Hugh Franklin (suffragist)|Hugh Franklin]], was another prominent figure in the suffrage movement, although his actions therein embarrassed the Franklin family. Rosalind's middle name, "Elsie", was in memory of Hugh's first wife, who died in the [[1918 flu pandemic]].<ref name="Glynn, p.1"/> Her family was actively involved with the [[Working Men's College]], where her father taught the subjects of electricity, magnetism, and the history of the [[Great War]] in the evenings, later becoming the vice principal.<ref>Maddox, p. 20.</ref><ref>Sayre, p. 35.</ref>

Franklin's parents helped settle Jewish refugees from Europe who had escaped the [[Nazis]], particularly those from the ''[[Kindertransport]]''.<ref>Polcovar, p. 20.</ref> They took in two Jewish children to their home, and one of them, a nine-year-old Austrian, Evi Eisenstädter, shared Jenifer's room.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Simkin |first1=John |title=Rosalind Franklin |url=http://spartacus-educational.com/SCfranklinR.htm |website=Spartacus Educational |access-date=13 February 2015 |year=1997}}</ref> (Evi's father Hans Mathias Eisenstädter had been imprisoned in [[Buchenwald]], and after liberation, the family adopted the surname "Ellis".)<ref>{{cite web |title=Hans (John) Mathias Eisenstadter Ellis |url=http://www.geni.com/people/Hans-John-Eisenstadter-Ellis/6000000004979539587 |website=Geni |date=31 July 1900 |access-date=13 February 2015}}</ref><ref name=genealogy>{{cite web |title=Evi Ellis |url=http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/s/c/h/Ella-Elisabeth-Schiller-Victoria/WEBSITE-0001/UHP-0252.html |website=Ancestry.com |access-date=13 February 2015}}</ref>

===Education===
From early childhood, Franklin showed exceptional scholastic abilities. At age six, she joined her brother Roland at [[Norland Place School]], a private day school in West London. At that time, her aunt Mamie (Helen Bentwich), described her to her husband: "Rosalind is alarmingly clever – she spends all her time doing arithmetic for pleasure, and invariably gets her sums right."<ref>Maddox, p. 15.</ref> Franklin also developed an early interest in [[cricket]] and [[field hockey|hockey]]. At age nine, she entered a boarding school, Lindores School for Young Ladies in Sussex.<ref name=berger>{{cite web |last1=Berger |first1=Doreen |title=A Biography of The Dark Lady Of Notting Hill |url=http://www.theus.org.uk/article/biography-dark-lady-notting-hill |publisher=United Synagogue Women |access-date=7 February 2015 |date=3 December 2014 |archive-date=4 June 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160604135134/http://www.theus.org.uk/article/biography-dark-lady-notting-hill |url-status=dead }}</ref> The school was near the seaside, and the family wanted a good environment for Franklin's delicate health.<ref>Maddox, p. 21–22.</ref>

Franklin was 11 when she went to [[St Paul's Girls' School]] in [[Hammersmith]], west London, one of the few girls' schools in London that taught physics and chemistry.<ref name=berger/><ref>Glynn, p. 25.</ref><ref>Sayre, p. 41.</ref> At St Paul's, she excelled in science, Latin,<ref>Maddox, p. 30.</ref> and sports.<ref>Maddox, p. 26.</ref> Franklin also learned German, and became fluent in French, a language she would later find useful. Franklin topped her classes, and won annual awards. Her only educational weakness was in music, for which the school music director, the composer [[Gustav Holst]], once called upon her mother to enquire whether she might have suffered from hearing problems or [[tonsillitis]].<ref>Glynn, p. 28.</ref> With six distinctions, Franklin passed her matriculation in 1938, winning a scholarship for university, the School Leaving Exhibition of £30 a year for three years, and £5 from her grandfather.<ref>Glynn, p. 30.</ref> Franklin's father asked her to give the scholarship to a deserving refugee student.<ref name=berger/>

===Cambridge and World War II===
Franklin went to [[Newnham College, Cambridge]], in 1938 and studied chemistry within the [[Natural Sciences Tripos]]. There, she met the [[Spectroscopy|spectroscopist]] [[Bill Price (physicist)|Bill Price]], who worked with her as a laboratory demonstrator and who later became one of her senior colleagues at King's College London.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Dixon |first1=R. N. |author2=D. M. Agar |author3=R. E. Burge |title=William Charles Price. 1 April 1909−−10 March 1993 |journal=[[Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society]] |year=1997 |volume=43 |page=438 |doi=10.1098/rsbm.1997.0023 |jstor=770344|doi-access=free }}</ref> In 1941 Franklin was awarded [[second-class honours]] from her final exams. The distinction was accepted as a bachelor's degree in qualifications for employment. Cambridge began awarding titular [[Bachelor of Arts|BA]] and [[Master of Arts (Oxbridge and Dublin)|MA]] degrees to women from 1947 and the previous women graduates retroactively received these earned degrees.<ref>''Fact sheet: Women at Cambridge: A Chronology'', [http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/press/factsheets/women2.html]. {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120114162700/http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/press/factsheets/women2.html|date=14 January 2012}}</ref>  In her last year at Cambridge, Franklin met a French refugee Adrienne Weill, a former student of [[Marie Curie]], who had a huge influence on her life and career and who helped her to improve her conversational French.<ref>Polcovar, p. 31.</ref><ref>Williams, p. 279</ref>

Franklin was awarded a research fellowship at Newnham College, with which she joined the physical chemistry laboratory of the [[University of Cambridge]] to work under [[Ronald George Wreyford Norrish]], who later won the [[Nobel Prize in Chemistry]]. In her one year of work there, Franklin did not have much success.<ref>''Rosalind Franklin'', Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's Dolan DNA Learning Center, ID 1649, [http://www.dnalc.org/view/16049-Rosalind-Franklin-.html] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180903045728/https://www.dnalc.org/view/16049-Rosalind-Franklin-.html|date=3 September 2018}}.</ref> As described by his biographer, Norrish was "obstinate and almost perverse in argument, overbearing and sensitive to criticism".<ref>{{cite journal |title=Ronald George Wreyford Norrish, 9 November 1897 – 7 June 1978 |last1=Dainton |first1=Sir Frederick Sydney |journal=[[Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society]] |year=1981 |volume=27 |pages=379–424 |doi=10.1098/rsbm.1981.0016 |jstor=769878|s2cid=72584163 |doi-access=free }}</ref> He could not decide upon the assignment of work for her. At that time Norrish was succumbing due to heavy drinking. Franklin wrote that he made her despise him completely.<ref>Maddox, p. 72.</ref>

Resigning from Norrish's Lab, Franklin fulfilled the requirements of the [[Conscription in the United Kingdom|National Service Acts]] by working as an assistant research officer at the [[British Coal Utilisation Research Association]] (BCURA) in 1942.<ref name="Profile" /> The BCURA was located on the Coombe Springs Estate near [[Kingston upon Thames]] near the southwestern boundary of London. Norrish acted as advisor to the military at BCURA. [[John G. Bennett]] was the director. [[Marcello Pirani]] and [[Victor Goldschmidt]], both refugees from the Nazis, were consultants and lectured at BCURA while Franklin worked there.<ref name="nlm-coal" />

During her BCURA research Franklin initially stayed at Adrienne Weill's boarding house in Cambridge until her cousin, Irene Franklin, proposed that they share living quarters at a vacated house in [[Putney]] that belonged to her uncle. With Irene, Rosalind volunteered as an [[Air Raid Warden]] and regularly made patrols to see the welfare of people during air raids.<ref>Polcovar, p. 37.</ref>

Franklin studied the [[porosity]] of coal using helium to determine its density.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Harris |first1=P.J.F. |title=Rosalind Franklin's work on coal, carbon, and graphite |journal=Interdisciplinary Science Reviews |date=March 2001 |volume=26 |issue=3 |pages=204–210 |doi=10.1179/030801801679467 |bibcode=2001ISRv...26..204H |s2cid=269381 |url=http://www.personal.rdg.ac.uk/~scsharip/REF_paper.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/http://www.personal.rdg.ac.uk/~scsharip/REF_paper.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live}}</ref> Through this, she discovered the relationship between the fine constrictions in the pores of coals and the permeability of the porous space. By concluding that substances were expelled in order of molecular size as temperature increased, she helped classify coals and accurately predict their performance for fuel purposes and for production of wartime devices such as [[gas masks]].<ref>{{cite web |url=https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/retrieve/Narrative/KR/p-nid/186 |title=The Rosalind Franklin Papers: The Holes in Coal: Research at BCURA and in Paris, 1942–1951 |publisher=Profiles.nlm.nih.gov |access-date=25 July 2013}}</ref> This work was the basis of Franklin's PhD thesis ''The physical chemistry of solid organic [[colloid]]s with special reference to coal'' for which the University of Cambridge awarded her a PhD in 1945.<ref name=thesis>{{cite thesis|first=Rosalind|last=Franklin|title=The physical chemistry of solid organic colloids, with special reference to the structure of coal and related materials|publisher=University of Cambridge|degree=PhD|url=http://ulmss-newton.lib.cam.ac.uk/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=29488|id={{EThOS|uk.bl.ethos.599181}}|year=1946|oclc=879396430}}</ref> It was also the basis of several papers.<ref name="nlm-coal" />