Interviewee: Raymond Gosling. Raymond Gosling - Rosalind Franklin's graduate student - talks about what Franklin knew from the B-form diffraction pattern. (DNAi Location: Code > Finding the structure > Players > Rosalind Franklin > What Rosalind knew)

Rosalind was tickled pink because we'd been working away and we knew from the way we could take water in and out of the structure, and further change the structure from one crystalline to a paracrystalline thing with ease, that the things that the water were attaching to was the sodium and phosphorus, you had the phosphate group and the sodiums sticking to that, and that attracted a whole lot of water molecules round it. So the water going in and out meant that the phosphoruses must be on the outside, and so she laughed at them, much to their discomfiture I think, and said oh look, you've got it inside out, the phosphoruses are all on the outside and they are, for the following reasons. And she explained her experimental work and her reasoning and so they sat back and absorbed that and suitably chastened. They, I don't know what they did, they probably didn't do anything for a while.

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