You may note that the full name of the UF version of Rose Tyler is "Rosalind Franklin Tyler". This is not canonical in any way, and in fact, as I noted in the discussion thread on her BPGD file, one has rather a hard time picturing her parents as depicted in the series giving their daughter that name (my assumption is that they were a bit stuck and Dr. Franklin was named on the cover of a nearby hospital magazine :).

She makes a little more sense as the namesake of the high school aboard the SDF-17 that Virginia Shepard attended as a teenager, because Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) was one of the greatest scientist not many people have ever heard of, and something of a personal hero of mine. She was a pioneering X-ray crystallographer who had the misfortune of being a woman - a Jewish woman - in the Anglo-Saxon-Protestant man's world of British science in the first half of the 20th century. She was considered abrasive and borderline insufferable by many of her peers, probably just because she wasn't prepared to let them patronize her - the kind of woman who routinely received but never accepted remarks like, "You know, you'd be rather attractive if you'd just do something with your hair."

In the early 1950s she was working on that holy grail of biophysics, the structure of DNA - an investigation she was well-placed to carry out, since she was one of the world's leading experts on using X-rays to image the structure of molecules. In 1953, without Franklin's permission or even her knowledge, her own team lead at King's College London, Maurice Wilkins, showed the best of her images of the DNA molecule to the competition, James Watson and Francis Crick, at Cambridge University. You may have heard of Watson and Crick. They used that picture to beat the person who took it to publication with the most important discovery of mid-20th-century biology, published her supporting data as a sort of "oh, and this" sidebar in the issue of Nature that included their key paper, and walked off (along with Wilkins - the cheek!) with the 1962 Nobel Prize in the awkwardly named category "physiology or medicine".

By then, of course, it didn't matter to Franklin that she'd unwittingly made it possible for them to beat her to the discovery, since she'd been dead for four years. It's not entirely clear that she ever learned that they had done it.

So. She was kind of awesome, she got shafted hugely by much more famous "colleagues", and she died young. And, though she'd be annoyed with me for saying it, she was (based on the photographic evidence) a good-looking woman if you like them dark and a bit frowny. I've been a little bit in love with her since I first heard of her, some years ago. Least I could do was name a school and a favorite lady-scientist character after her.

Also, I like to think that in Valhalla, she and Nikola Tesla had the most adorably awkward scientist romance since Pierre and Marie Curie.

--G.
"... and your hips are... very supportive."
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>Also, I like to think that in Valhalla, she and Nikola Tesla had the
>most adorably awkward scientist romance since Pierre and Marie Curie.

<snrk> I know exactly what you mean, there was a very good (although really too short) documentary about Marie Curie on TV here just last week.

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

"Nikola, you know I love you very much."

"Yes, dear heart?"

"And you know that it is a deep and abiding love that means there is nothing I would not do for you, do you not?"

"Yes... er, where is this going?"

"Nikola, if you are to sleep anywhere other than the sofa again you will never make me wear the pigeon costume again!"

---
"Yeah, I'm definitely going to hell/But I'll have all the best stories to tell" -- Frank Turner, The Ballad of Me and My Friends

"... Yes, dear."

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."