Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin first made her name studying the microstructure of coal for the British coal industry, then applied X-ray diffraction to DNA at King's College London, producing the images, including Photograph 51, that Watson and Crick used without her knowledge. At Birkbeck she moved on to viruses, leading work with Aaron Klug on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus before her death at 37 in 1958.