Rosalind Franklin Best Quotes & Sayings

As a scientist Miss [Rosalind] Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook. Her photographs are among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken. — John Desmond Bernal

The results suggest a helical structure which must be very closely packed containing probably 2, 3 or 4 coaxial nucleic acid chains per helical unit and having the phosphate groups near the outside. — Rosalind Franklin

I think she [Rosalind Franklin] was a good experimentalist but certainly not of the first rank. She was simply not in the same class as Eigen or Bragg or Pauling, nor was she as good as Dorothy Hodgkin. She did not even select DNA to study. It was given to her. Her theoretical crystallography was very average. — Francis Crick

In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall succeed in our aims: the improvement of mankind. — Rosalind Franklin

We wish to discuss a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid. (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biologic interest. — Rosalind Franklin

Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. — Rosalind Franklin

Her [Rosalind Franklin] devotion to research showed itself at its finest in the last months of her life. Although stricken with an illness which she knew would be fatal, she continued to work right up to the end. — John Desmond Bernal

Conclusion: Big helix in several chains, phosphates on outside, phosphate-phosphate inter-helical bonds disrupted by water. Phosphate links available to proteins. — Rosalind Franklin

By and large, people who choose to go into science are not greatly interested in psychological problems... He liked the exactness of science, and the perfection of its truths - Humanity could be rather messy in comparison. — Brenda Maddox

I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our insignificant race in a tiny corner of the universe, and still less in us, as still more insignificant individuals. Again, I see no reason why the belief that we are insignificant or fortuitous should lessen our faith. — Rosalind Franklin

Science, for me, gives a partial explanation for life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment. — Rosalind Franklin

She discovered in a series of beautifully executed researches the fundamental distinction between carbons that turned on heating into graphite and those that did not. Further she related this difference to the chemical constitution of the molecules from which carbon was made. She was already a recognized authority in industrial physico-chemistry when she chose to abandon this work in favour of the far more difficult and more exciting fields of biophysics.

{Bernal on the death of scientist Rosalind Franklin} — J. D. Bernal