📍50 Chepstow Villas, Notting Hill, London W11 2QZ, England
1920 – 1929“I grew up in Notting Hill in London, in a Jewish family with a strong intellectual tradition — my father Ellis Franklin was a barrister and my mother Muriel were both deeply committed to education. The Franklin family home was a place of serious conversation and high expectation, and I absorbed from it the conviction that hard work and precision were non-negotiable. I studied chemistry at Cambridge and then went to Paris to learn X-ray crystallography, which gave me the tools for the work that defined my career: the X-ray diffraction images of DNA that provided Watson and Crick with the crucial evidence for the double helix structure. My Image 51 — the X-ray photograph of DNA — was shown to Watson without my knowledge or permission, and the Nobel Prize that followed went to Watson, Crick and Wilkins. I died of ovarian cancer in 1958, four years before the prize was awarded.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
Sources: Maddox, B. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (2002), HarperCollins; Glynn, J. My Sister Rosalind Franklin (2012), Oxford University Press; Watson, J. The Double Helix (1968), Atheneum