Rosalind Franklin
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 spectroscopist Bill Price, who worked with her as a laboratory demonstrator and who later became one of her senior colleagues at King's College London. 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 BA and MA degrees to women from 1947 and the previous women graduates retroactively received these earned degrees. 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.

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. As described by his biographer, Norrish was "obstinate and almost perverse in argument, overbearing and sensitive to criticism". 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.

Resigning from Norrish's Lab, Franklin fulfilled the requirements of the National Service Acts by working as an assistant research officer at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA) in 1942. 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.

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.

Franklin studied the porosity of coal using helium to determine its density. 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. This work was the basis of Franklin's PhD thesis The physical chemistry of solid organic colloids with special reference to coal for which the University of Cambridge awarded her a PhD in 1945. It was also the basis of several papers.
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