Rosalind Franklin Trivia
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47 free Rosalind Franklin trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 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 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which of Franklin's students took Photo 51, the famous X-ray picture of DNA?
Raymond Gosling
Raymond Gosling: as Franklin prepared to leave King's, he gave the picture to Wilkins, his new supervisor.
Q 02An unpublished 1953 article on the DNA discovery, found in Franklin's papers, was written for which magazine?
Time
Time: its London reporter wrote that the King's and Cambridge teams 'linked up, confirming each other's work from time to time'.
Q 03In a 1940 letter, Franklin chided her father for treating science as something apart from what?
Real life
Real life: in the same letter she told him that faith in this world was perfectly possible without faith in another.
Q 04What was the profession of Franklin's wealthy father, Ellis?
Merchant banker
Merchant banker: some accounts say he opposed her going to Cambridge, but her biographers say he did not.
Q 05What was Franklin originally hired to investigate at King's, before Randall moved her onto DNA?
Proteins
Proteins: Randall never told Maurice Wilkins what he had promised her, so the two soon clashed over their roles.
Q 06St Paul's Girls' School, which Franklin joined at 11, was unusual for teaching girls what?
Physics and chemistry
Physics and chemistry: Franklin women were expected to go into community service, but at school she was already set on science.
Q 07Which composer, then music director at St Paul's Girls' School, noted Franklin's weak ear for music?
Gustav Holst
Gustav Holst: he wrote The Planets while teaching at the school, where he ran the music department for nearly 30 years.
Q 08Franklin's father asked her to give her university scholarship money to whom?
A deserving refugee student
A deserving refugee student: the Franklins also took two Jewish children who had fled the Nazis into their own home.
Q 09At which Cambridge college did Franklin study chemistry from 1938?
Newnham
Newnham: there she met the scientist Adrienne Weill, who became her mentor and later helped her land a research post.
Q 10In early 1953, Franklin's notes said DNA's structure would allow any sequence of which of its components?
Bases
Bases: she wrote that 'an infinite variety of nucleotide sequences' was possible, though she never worked out how the bases pair up.
Q 11During the Second World War, which volunteer role did Franklin take on?
Air raid warden
Air raid warden: meanwhile she gave up her Cambridge fellowship to research coal for the war effort, work that earned her a PhD.
Q 12Franklin measured the porosity of coal using which gas to determine its density?
Helium
Helium: its tiny atoms reached pores that other fluids could not, so comparing the densities revealed fine constrictions inside coal.
Q 13Franklin's coal classification helped predict performance in fuels and in which wartime device?
Gas masks
Gas masks: she found that coal's pores act as molecular sieves, blocking substances by their molecular size.
Q 21In July 1952, Franklin posted a mock funeral notice announcing the death of what?
The A-form helix
The A-form helix: her data briefly argued against a helix in that form, though she later concluded both forms were two-chain helices.
Q 22In her November 1951 lecture, Franklin placed the phosphate groups where in the DNA structure?
Near the outside
Near the outside: Watson attended the talk, and he and Crick soon built a model with the phosphates in the middle.
Q 23What did Watson and Crick's director order after Franklin faulted their first model?
Stop the work
Stop the work: the head of the Cavendish ordered them to leave DNA to King's, and they kept off it for most of the next year.
Q 14In which city did Franklin master X-ray crystallography before she moved to King's College London?
Paris
Paris: she loved the lab's lively lunchtime debates and seriously considered never returning to England.
Q 15Franklin became expert at applying X-ray diffraction to which kind of substances?
Amorphous ones
Amorphous ones: that rare skill with messy, non-crystalline samples is why King's put her onto its DNA X-ray research.
Q 16Franklin's research on why some coals turn into graphite later aided which material?
Carbon fibre
Carbon fibre: she also identified carbons that refuse to turn into graphite on heating, and those became heat-proof glassy carbon for crucibles.
Q 17In his 1968 memoir, what did James Watson portray Franklin as not competent to do?
Interpret her own data
Interpret her own data: many scientists and reviewers protested his portrait of her, complaining that it was inaccurate.
Q 18Franklin's key innovation at King's was a camera chamber that controlled what?
Humidity
Humidity: controlling it showed that earlier, fuzzy DNA pictures had muddled two different forms of the molecule.
Q 19Which letter did Franklin give the long, thin form of DNA she studied at King's?
B
B: in February 1953 she went back to her pictures of this form and began analysing them closely.
Q 20When Randall split the DNA work between Franklin and Wilkins, which did Franklin choose?
The A form
The A form: she expected its crystalline pictures to give more precise data, yet the famous Photo 51 shows the other form.
Q 24Who gave Crick the MRC report containing Franklin's crystallographic calculations in February 1953?
Max Perutz
Max Perutz: historians now argue that report mattered more to Watson and Crick's success than Photo 51 did.
Q 25After learning of Watson and Crick's model, what did Franklin do with her March 1953 draft?
Added that her data fit it
Added that her data fit it: her paper then ran third in the same issue of Nature as Watson and Crick's.
Q 26Watson visited King's on 30 January 1953 carrying a preprint of whose incorrect DNA structure?
Linus Pauling
Linus Pauling: his triple-helix model repeated the very mistake Franklin had caught in Watson and Crick's first attempt.
Q 27In March 1953 Franklin left King's for which London college?
Birkbeck
Birkbeck: it began as an institute for educating working men, and she found its atmosphere far friendlier than King's.
Q 28Which crystallographer, known for promoting women in the field, recruited Franklin in 1953?
J. D. Bernal
J. D. Bernal: after she died, he wrote that her photographs were among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken.
Q 29Franklin showed that all particles of which pathogen were the same length, contradicting Norman Pirie?
Tobacco mosaic virus
Tobacco mosaic virus: she published the finding in Nature anyway, and her observation that the particles were uniform proved correct.
Q 30Franklin first noticed signs of her illness during a 1956 work trip to which country?
The United States
The United States: even while she underwent treatment back in London, her group turned out over a dozen papers in 1956 and 1957.