Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
60 free Rosalind Franklin trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Rosalind Franklin trivia quiz covers the crystallographer whose X-ray images sat at the heart of the DNA story and whose name was left off it for decades. The easy questions handle Photo 51, who took it, who showed it to Watson, the college where she worked and the disease that killed her at 37. From there it moves through the life: the banker father, the alarmingly clever child who did sums for fun, the composer who thought she might be deaf, the coal that earned her a doctorate, and the Paris years that made her an expert. The harder end covers the humidity chamber, the A and B forms, the joke funeral notice for the helix, the MRC report Perutz handed to Crick, the papers she posted the day before the Cambridge model was finished, the move to 'the slums' of Birkbeck, the tobacco mosaic virus, the polio grant, the will that left an Austin car to Aaron Klug, and the pub plaque that took twenty years to include her. Every answer was checked against Franklin's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our DNA and famous scientists quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The famous DNA X-ray image Photo 51 was actually taken by which of Franklin's students?
Raymond Gosling
He had been Wilkins's graduate student until Randall reassigned him to Franklin.
Q 02Who showed Photo 51 to James Watson without Franklin's permission?
Maurice Wilkins
Watson had just been chased out of Franklin's lab after suggesting she could not interpret her own data.
Q 03Franklin was born in 1920 in which London district?
Notting Hill
The family was affluent, influential and Jewish; her great-uncle Herbert Samuel had been Home Secretary.
Q 04What was the profession of Franklin's father, Ellis?
Merchant banker
He also taught electricity, magnetism and the history of the Great War at the Working Men's College.
Q 05Franklin's great-uncle Herbert Samuel was the first practising Jew to serve in what?
The British Cabinet
He was Home Secretary in 1916; her aunt Mamie was a suffrage campaigner and London County Councillor.
Q 06Franklin's aunt called the six-year-old 'alarmingly clever' for spending all her time doing what?
Arithmetic
'And invariably gets her sums right,' the aunt added.
Q 07St Paul's Girls' School, which Franklin joined at 11, was unusual for teaching girls what?
Physics and chemistry
She excelled in science, Latin and sport, and became fluent in French.
Q 08Which composer, the school's music director, wondered whether Franklin might have hearing problems?
Gustav Holst
He wondered whether tonsillitis might be to blame.
Q 09Franklin's father asked her to give her university scholarship money to whom?
A deserving refugee student
Her parents helped settle Jewish refugees from the Nazis and took two Kindertransport children into their home.
Q 10At which Cambridge college did Franklin study chemistry from 1938?
Newnham
The college later named a graduate residence after her and put her bust in its garden.
Q 11Franklin left Cambridge in 1941 with which grade of honours, since women could not then receive actual degrees?
Second
Cambridge only began giving women titular BA and MA degrees in 1947, retroactively.
Q 12Franklin's Cambridge PhD, awarded in 1945, grew out of her wartime research on what?
Coal
She joked she was 'a physical chemist who knows very little physical chemistry, but quite a lot about the holes in coal'.
Q 13During the war Franklin volunteered in which civil defence role with her cousin Irene?
Air raid warden
They shared a house in Putney and patrolled during raids to check on residents.
Q 21Franklin's key innovation at King's was a camera chamber that controlled what?
Humidity
Saturated salt solutions did the job, and her images soon outclassed Wilkins's.
Q 22Franklin found DNA existed in two forms. Which letter did she give the 'wet' form?
B
Above 75 per cent humidity the fibre was long and thin; dry, it was short and fat.
Q 23When Randall split the DNA work between Franklin and Wilkins, which did Franklin choose?
The A form
It was the data-rich crystalline form; Wilkins took the B form.
Q 24In July 1952 Franklin and Gosling circulated a mock funeral notice announcing the death of what?
Q 14Franklin measured the porosity of coal using which gas to determine its density?
Helium
Her work on the fine constrictions in coal's pores helped predict its performance in fuel and gas masks.
Q 15Franklin's coal classification helped predict performance in fuels and in which wartime device?
Gas masks
The thesis was titled The physical chemistry of solid organic colloids with special reference to coal.
Q 16In Paris from 1947 Franklin learned X-ray crystallography under which researcher?
Jacques Mering
He taught her to apply diffraction to amorphous substances such as rayon and coal.
Q 17In Paris Franklin became expert at applying X-ray diffraction to what kind of substances?
Amorphous ones
Most crystallographers worked on regular crystals; she worked on carbon and rayon.
Q 18Franklin coined the terms 'graphitising' and 'non-graphitising' for forms of what?
Carbon
The work is still part of the mainstream physics and chemistry of carbon.
Q 19Franklin joined King's College London in 1951 in the MRC Biophysics Unit directed by whom?
John Randall
He redirected her from proteins to DNA before she even arrived, without telling Wilkins.
Q 20The purified 'Signer DNA' used at King's had been prepared from which calf tissue?
Thymus
Rudolf Signer of Berne handed it out freely at a Faraday Society meeting in 1950.
The A-form helix
It was a joke at the expense of Wilkins, who insisted both forms were helical, and asked him to speak in memory of the late helix.
Q 25In her November 1951 lecture, Franklin placed the phosphate groups where in the DNA structure?
Near the outside
Watson attended, failed to grasp it, and helped build a model with the phosphates inside.
Q 26Watson and Crick's flawed first model, built after Franklin's 1951 lecture, had how many strands?
Three
Franklin pointed out that its central phosphate core could not be right, and the pair dropped DNA for a year.
Q 27Who gave Crick the MRC report containing Franklin's crystallographic calculations in February 1953?
Max Perutz
The report confirmed the 34-angstrom repeat and the C2 symmetry that told Crick the strands ran in opposite directions.
Q 28Franklin's two A-DNA papers reached Acta Crystallographica on 6 March 1953, the day before what?
Watson and Crick finished their model
She had certainly written them before she knew anything of the Cambridge work.
Q 29Watson visited King's on 30 January 1953 carrying a preprint of whose incorrect DNA structure?
Linus Pauling
Franklin was unimpressed; Watson backed out of her lab straight into Wilkins.
Q 30Shown the Watson-Crick model, Franklin said 'It's very pretty, but how are they going to' what?
Prove it
As an experimentalist she distrusted model-building until the data demanded it.