Franklin was born in London on July 25, 1920, to a family with long-standing Jewish roots. Her parents, who were both under the age of 25 when she was born, were avowed socialists. Ellis Franklin devoted his life to fulfilling his socialist ideals by teaching at the Working Men's College, while his wife, Muriel Waley Franklin, cared for their family, in which Rosalind was the second of five children and the first daughter. From an early age, Franklin excelled at science. She attended St. Paul's Girls' School, one of the few educational institutions that offered physics and chemistry to female students. A foundation scholar at the school, Rosalind decided at the age of 15 to pursue a career in science, despite her father's exhortations to consider social work. In 1938, Franklin enrolled at Newnham College, Cambridge, the second-youngest student in her class.
She graduated from Cambridge in 1941 with a high second degree and accepted a research scholarship at Newnham to study gas-phase chromatography with future Nobel Prize winner Ronald G. W. Norrish . Finding Norrish difficult to work with, she quit graduate school the following year to accept a job as assistant research officer with the British Coal Utilization Research Association (CURA).
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