Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920-58) was a brilliant British chemist whose x-ray diffraction studies provided vital insight into the helical nature of DNA.  However her contribution to the discovery of DNA's structure was neither properly nor fully acknowledged by the  male scientists who used her data without her knowledge and would go on to gain glory and win, four years after her untimely death from ovarian cancer, the Nobel prize for their work.  For more information about Rosalind Franklin, please visit The Rosalind Franklin Papers website or read Anne Sayre's Rosalind Franklin and DNA or Brenda Maddox's Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA. 

The photograph to the left was taken in the 1940s somewhere in post-war Norway.