Freda Collier obituary

My aunt, Freda Collier, who has died aged 97, became well-known in the early 1950s as part of the core team of Maurice Wilkins, John Randall and Rosalind Franklin (plus Franklin's PhD student, Raymond Gosling) working at King's College London on the structure of DNA. Freda was Franklin's x-ray photographer and headed the photographic laboratory at King's that produced the famous "photo 51" seen by James Watson from Cambridge University. Watson immediately realised that the molecule revealed was a double helix.As Watson described later in his book The Double Helix (1968): "The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race." After the announcement by Watson and his colleague Francis Crick in 1953 that the structure of DNA had finally been cracked, Freda travelled extensively in the US explaining the x-ray diffraction techniques used by the King's College team.She was born Freda Ticehurst in St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, the youngest of seven surviving children – five girls and two boys. Her early years as a photographer were at the General Electric Company in Wembley, north London, where Randall had previously worked, and it was he who persuaded her to join the King's College team in 1950.Her fiance had been killed during the second world war, but later she met and married the distinguished Church Army captain Frank Collier and settled in Folkestone. There were no children of the marriage, but she enjoyed the company of her many nieces and nephews...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Tags: People in science Obituaries Biology guardian.co.uk Medical research Nobel prizes Science prizes Source Type: news