Rosalind franklin discoveries pictures

When and where was Photo 51 taken?

The photo was taken in May 1952 by Rosalind Franklin and her PhD student Raymond Gosling in the basement underneath the chemistry laboratories at the MRC Biophysics Unit.

Franklin, a biophysicist, had been recruited to the unit to work on the structure of DNA. The unit was then part of the King’s College campus on the Strand in London. It was run by Sir John Randall, who had turned some of the university’s physics department over to studying biological problems.

The MRC Biophysics Unit moved to Drury Lane in the 1960s and later became the Randall Institute.

I now work in its most recent incarnation, the Randall Centre for Cell and Molecular Biophysics at King’s College’s Guy’s Hospital campus. So, Photo 51 is doubly significant for me. I’m an X-ray crystallographer so it’s part of my heritage in that respect, but all of us in the centre are proud of this link with the work in the 1950s.