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In 1962, Maurice Wilkins, Francis Crick, and James Watson received the Nobel Prize, but it was Rosalind Franklin's data and photographs of DNA that led to their discovery.
Brenda Maddox tells a powerful story of a remarkably single-minded, forthright, and tempestuous young woman who, at the age of fifteen, decided she was going to be a scientist, but who was airbrushed out of the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century.
- Sales Rank: #84991 in Books
- Published on: 2003-09
- Released on: 2003-09-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .94" w x 5.31" l, .66 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 416 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Her photographs of DNA were called "among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken," but physical chemist Rosalind Franklin never received due credit for the crucial role these played in the discovery of DNA's structure. In this sympathetic biography, Maddox argues that sexism, egotism and anti-Semitism conspired to marginalize a brilliant and uncompromising young scientist who, though disliked by some colleagues, was a warm and admired friend to many. Franklin was born into a well-to-do Anglo-Jewish family and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. After beginning her research career in postwar Paris she moved to Kings College, London, where her famous photographs of DNA were made. These were shown without her knowledge to James Watson, who recognized that they indicated the shape of a double helix and rushed to publish the discovery; with colleagues Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he won the Nobel Prize in 1962. Deeply unhappy at Kings, Rosalind left in 1953 for another lab, where she did important research on viruses, including polio. Her career was cut short when she died of ovarian cancer at age 37. Maddox sees her subject as a wronged woman, but this view seems rather extreme. Maddox (D.H. Lawrence) does not fully explore an essential question raised by the Franklin-Watson conflict: whether methodology and intuition play competing or complementary roles in scientific discovery. Drawing on interviews, published records, and a trove of personal letters to and from Rosalind, Maddox takes pains to illuminate her subject as a gifted scientist and a complex woman, but the author does not entirely dispel the darkness that clings to "the Sylvia Plath of molecular biology."
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Rosalind Franklin is known to few, yet she conducted crucial research that led to one of the most significant discoveries of the 20th century-the double helical structure of DNA. Because of her unpublished data and photographs, Francis Crick and James Watson were able to make the requisite connections. Until recently, Franklin was remembered only as the "dark lady"-a stereotypically frustrated and frustrating female scientist, as profiled in Watson's 1968 autobiography, The Double Helix. Maddox (whose D.H. Lawrence won the Whitbread Biography Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize) does an excellent job of revisiting Franklin's scientific contributions (to the point of overloading nonscientists) while revealing Franklin's complicated personality. She shows a woman of fiery intellect and fierce independence whom some saw as haughty, though to family and close friends she was warm and devoted. Maddox displays a unique voice in recounting Franklin's story, using letters written to family and friends for much of the text. Her voice subtly draws us in while holding us at arm's length, much like Franklin herself. By the end, the reader is bristling that Franklin should be mostly forgotten, but this biography provides some recompense. Recommended for public libraries with science collections and all academic libraries.
--Marianne Stowell Bracke, Univ. of Arizona Libs., Tucson
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Scientific American
The aphorism "history is always written by the victors" is as true for science as for geopolitics. Certainly it was the case for the discovery in 1953 of the double helical structure of DNA, the most important discovery in 20th-century biology. The victors were James Watson and Francis Crick, who together with Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for crossing the finish line first. The loser was Rosalind Franklin, who produced the x-ray data that most strongly supported the structure but was not properly acknowledged for her contributions. According to Watson's best-selling 1968 account of the great race, The Double Helix, Franklin was not even a contender, much less a major contributor. He painted her as a mere assistant to Wilkins who "had to go or be put in her place" because she had the audacity to think she might be able to work on DNA on her own. Worse yet, she "did not emphasize her feminine qualities," lamented Watson, who refers to her only as "Rosy." "The thought could not be avoided," he concluded, "that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab." Franklin never had a chance to respond; she died of ovarian cancer in 1958. Her good friend Anne Sayre did offer a rebuttal in Rosalind Franklin and DNA, but that biography is too polemical and pedantic to be either persuasive or a good read. Now, just in time for the 50th anniversary of the double helix, noted British biographer Brenda Maddox has produced a more balanced, nuanced and informed version of the tale. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA is neither a paean to Franklin nor a condemnation of her competitors. It's simply the story of a scientist's life as gleaned from extensive correspondence, published and unpublished manuscripts, laboratory notebooks, and interviews with many of the protagonists. It was an interesting life. Franklin, the daughter of a prominent Jewish family, was an "alarmingly clever" girl who spent her free time doing arithmetic for pleasure. She was educated at a series of academically rigorous schools culminating in the University of Cambridge, where, despite the fact that women were still excluded from receiving an undergraduate degree, she managed a Ph.D. in physical chemistry and developed the experimental style that was to characterize all her subsequent work-- an approach that was meticulous, albeit sometimes overly cautious. Then it was off to Paris, where she applied the new techniques of x-ray diffraction to the structure of coal. In France, Franklin bloomed both as a scientist, authoring numerous independent publications, and as a young woman free from the constraints of family and stuffy British society. It was a happy and productive period, as were her final years at Birkbeck College in London, where she collaborated with Aaron Klug on the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. Alas, the central and most important two years of her career were spent in the far less hospitable environment of the biophysics unit at King's College London. There she immediately locked horns with Wilkins over who would get to study the structure of DNA-- a subject that had been largely ignored during World War II, with its emphasis on more practical matters, but was increasingly regarded as the problem in structural biology. Wilkins, who had been researching the matter for years, had seniority but little insight or good data. It was Franklin, a newcomer to biology, who made the critical observation that DNA exists in two distinct forms, A and B, and produced the sharpest pictures of both. They reached a compromise that Franklin would work on the A form and Wilkins on the B and went their separate ways. Or so Franklin thought. In fact, Wilkins, in a weekend visit to Cambridge, spilled the King's beans to Watson and Crick, who soon thereafter began the model building. Although their approach was less meticulous than Franklin's, it was also far quicker. A few months later it was Watson's turn to visit London, where Wilkins showed him Franklin's startlingly clear x-ray photograph of the B form. On the train back to Cambridge, Watson drew the pattern from memory on the margin of his newspaper. Yet just two months later, in their historic letter to Nature, he and Crick claimed, "We were not aware of the details of the results presented [in accompanying papers from Franklin's and Wilkins's groups] ... when we devised our structure." How did Watson and Crick, with the complicity of Wilkins, get away with so brazenly heisting "Rosy's" data? Maddox offers several theories. The most obvious is Franklin's position as a female researcher at an institution where women were still not allowed to set foot in the senior common room. There was also the matter of anti-Semitism. Franklin's family may have anglicized their name, but her uncle was the first High Commissioner of Palestine, and she was active in Jewish relief groups. She felt isolated, even ostracized, in a school where theology was the largest department and "there were swirling cassocks and dog collars everywhere." We'll probably never know the full story, but Maddox's book shines new light on one of the key characters in the tale of the double helix. Rosalind Franklin may not have had the intuition of some of her competitors, but what she did possess was equally important: integrity.
Dean H. Hamer is a molecular geneticist at the National Cancer Institute. He is author of the upcoming The God Gene and co-author of Living with Our Genes and The Science of Desire.
Most helpful customer reviews
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I like it very
By Kj
The book arrive before. I like it very much
90 of 99 people found the following review helpful.
Franklin's real biography
By K. M. Pollard
Brenda Maddox does a masterful job of laying out the life story of Rosalind Franklin, the supposed "forgotten lady of DNA". This biography is far superior to the personal vendetta waged against J D Watson on Franklin's behalf by Anne Sayre (see my comments on "Rosalind Franklin and DNA" by Anne Sayre).
Rosalind Franklin is the King's College scientist who obtained the x-ray photograph of the B form of DNA which was an important piece of information in the eventual description of a model of the structure of DNA that was described by J D Watson and FHC Crick in 1953, and for which they, along with Maurice Wilkins, won the Nobel Prize. Much has been written about whether Franklin was robbed of credit for her DNA contribution, whether she would have determined the structure by herself, and whether she would have shared in the Nobel. Whether these things are true or may have come to pass is difficult to say. Franklin died in 1958 and without her answers to some of these questions we are only left to speculate.
However Maddox leaves little speculation about who Rosalind Franklin was. This is a model biography of a true pioneer and an excellent role model for those seeking a career in the sciences. My own career was greatly influenced by Watson's personal account of the description of the model DNA structure he and Crick proposed. At that time (1971) I was more taken with the intuitive thinking displayed by the protagonists and their after hours antics than by the portrayal of "Rosy". In following years I have read Sayre and also Crick and others and have been somewhat bemused by the situation that surrounds Franklin and DNA, perhaps because it is almost all personal opinion and speculation. Maddox's picture is none of this. Her book is the description of a talented, strong-willed, opinioned female scientist and yes, a feminist. There is little doubt that Franklin made significant scientific contributions. There is also little doubt that she was emotionally immature and fragile. There is even less doubt that she died far, far, far too young but with great dignity and spirit. The first chapters on the pre-Rosalind history of the Franklin's is slow going but the reader is more than compensated by the final chapters that touchingly describe Franklin's last months. In her last few years we see a woman making her place in a man's world, and doing it very successfully. Her emotional life may even have been close to being fulfilled. But abdominal pains herald the beginning of repeated cancer treatments which culminate in her death before her work on viral structure was to be displayed in exhibition. Watson's book is fun, an easy read about how science is done (by some) but Rosalind's story is filled with overwhelming emotion about how a life was lived and cut short. She was robbed of the only real prize - life.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
A Revelation
By Amazon Customer
As a career scientist and woman I am stunned (and embarrassed) that I did not know the full story of Rosalind Franklin before reading this book. Brenda Maddox sensitively tells the tale of a brilliant Jewish girl in WWII England who struggles to make a career and her mark in science. That Rosalind became a world renowned crystallographer is a testament to her inner strength and surpassing intellectual gifts; the legacy of her scientific achievement makes hers an important history. But Rosalind's story is raised to Tragedy by 2 facts. The first is that she was betrayed by some of the most regaled scientists of modern biology - Watson, Crick and Wilkins - who, when rewarded with the Nobel, did not acknowledge that Rosalind's work was integral to their uncovering the structure of DNA's double helix. This scientific theft moves into the tragic realm with the second fact -the "Dark Lady" was stricken with ovarian cancer and died within several years of her discovery - allowing this personal betrayal to go without answer.
No, this book is not a feminist polemic. It is a story of grace under duress, a story of courage, and beauty and permanence. In sum, Rosalind's personal and scientific life is the story of a soul that burned laser bright. She is the person that I would most like to meet, were that possible, and I thank Brenda Maddox for introducing her to me.
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