English crystallographer, Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920-1958) famously produced the X-Ray diffraction images that informed Watson and Crick’s 1953 revelation of the double-helix structure of DNA. Franklin applied the laborious Patterson function to her images in order to reveal the overall dimensions of the structure of the molecule and to obtain clues about its array of atoms.
Scientific instruments have opened up sensory domains far beyond the constraints of biological perception. Technology has extended our phenotype enormously and has pushed the boundaries of what can be known...
Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958. She ineligible for the Nobel Prize awarded to Crick, Watson, and Wilkins in 1962 because the rules forbid posthumous nominations.
