In March 1953, Maurice Wilkins of King's College, London, announced the departure of his obstructive colleague Rosalind Franklin to rival Cavendish Laboratory scientist Francis Crick. But it was too late. Franklin's unpublished data and crucial photograph of DNA had already been seen by her competitors at the Cambridge University lab. With the aid of these, plus their own knowledge, Watson and Crick discovered the structure of the molecule that genes are composed of -- DNA, the secret of life. Five years later, at the age of thirty-seven, after more brilliant research under J. D. Bernal at Birkbeck College, Rosalind died of ovarian cancer. In 1962, Wilkins, Crick and Watson were awarded the Nobel Prize for their elucidation of DNA's structure. Franklin's part was forgotten until she was caricatured in Watson's book The Double Helix.

In this full and balanced biography, Brenda Maddox has been given unique access to Franklin's personal correspondence and has interviewed all the principal scientists involved, including Crick, Watson and Wilkins.

This is a powerful story, told by one of the finest biographers, 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.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 19 reviews)

Glass Ceiling Exposed

Women in science and mathematics often are ignored. Rosalind Franklin, who should have won a Nobel Prize, has her story told very carefully in this excellent, well-written book, which is a pleasure to read.
May 29, 2008

Well written account of a scientist who is now famous

One of the more extraordinary things that has happened over the last 20 years or so is the lionization of a woman who until now was almost entirely unheard of in the world at large. Maurice Wilkins too was once almost unheard of, even though he shared the Nobel with Watson and Crick for the discovery/elucidation of the structure of DNA. Rosalind Franklin has now probably leapfrogged Wilkins into being one of the legendary scientists of the 20th century. This is all part of the way the media to a certain extent gets hold of an apparently "good story" and runs with it.

In this excellently written book, Brenda Maddox lays out Rosalind Franklin's short life very well, managing to make what could indeed have been excruitiatingly boring into something that succeeds in holding your attention very well. I knew Maurice Wilkins and some of the other characters in the book, so perhaps I am not the ideal dispassionate observer, but I fully expected to be a little bored by the book. I don't really have anything else to say about the now-famous Photograph 51 which James Watson saw, as no doubt this part of the story will run and run. All I will say is that Maddox points out that Franklin disliked her time at King's and was only too delighted to move to Birkbeck and that DNA was something associated with that group which, to put it simply, she was probably only too happy to leave to others to fight over. Certainly she found a very good research group at Birkbeck and her TMV work, and the results that came from it later after her death, are in the textbooks just like the structure of DNA.

Maddox could have made this into a martyr's story but she succeeds very well in pointing out the iniquities of patriachy in the science of the time, without making Franklin into a victim, because, as she shows, Franklin would no doubt not have seen it this way. In fact Franklin comes over as "difficult" to many (mainly UK) scientists, but to foreigners often delightful. Maddox suggests this has something to do with her Jewishness, which is quite plausible, but I think also is not an uncommon trait among many Britons who share Dr. Johnson's view that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel", producing a nostalgia and yearning for a people and culture that are not your own.

In the end my main feeling engendered by reading the book was of sadness -for her early death, but also because she seemed to find it difficult to get along with many people and hence experienced more than her share of unhappiness and difficulties in her personal and professional life.

As so often with scientific biographies I wish there had been more science in the book. It is very difficult for us today to appreciate the problem of finding the structure of DNA and what exactly were the thought processes behind getting the double helix. This is something that Watson's book succeeds in brilliantly despite its flaws. Certainly Watson (almost as usual) comes off poorly when you consider that he wrote unflattering things about Franklin after he had been her friend for the last few years of her life (or at least a good colleague) and knew that what he was writing was unfair. Who knows what he thought about the other protagonists but was constrained to reign in his thoughts as they were still alive, unlike Franklin who was no longer around to fight back?

I have to say I am one of those who laments the hold the Nobel Prizes have on the public's imagination. Science is a collective enterprise and prize giving is often unfair, wrong or misleading.
December 26, 2007

Scientists at work.

After reading the book it is clear the scientific community is both collegial and cut throat. In Franklin's case, the lure of honor compels a fellow scientist to use Rosalind's research without giving her the credit she deserved in uncovering the structure of DNA. Maddox provides insight into the not always amicable inner workings of a research lab and the psychology of scientists.

As an elite, Jewish, female Francophile, Franklin was not an easy person to get along with, especially in the lab at King's College London under Dr. Randall. If she had a difficult personality though, she was anything but shy and certainly was not politically naive. She held her own in a male dominated environment and perhaps this is the reason she become known as the Dark Lady. Maddox does her best to give Franklin a balanced appraisal.

Scientists share information and materials through attendance at conferences and in social settings and keeping up with each other's work is expected. But, the use of Rosalind's unpublished material (the crucial photo 51 and experimental data) without her knowledge, to make a breakthrough discovery, is of questionable ethics.

The author presents some insight into the mentality of the scientist. She quotes Albert Einstein, "that a scientist makes science `the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the whirlpool of personal experience.'"(32). To Rosalind "science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated."(61) Is this why she found it so difficult to explain her work to family and friends? They simply could not understand?

Maddox notes: "it can be argued that scientific discovery is not creativity in the sense that artistic composition is. `Science differs from other realms of human endeavor in that its substance does not derive from the activity of those who practice it'"(213) Therefore it is interesting when an eminent scientist is caught in the trap of his own beliefs and exposed. This occurred when Rosalind corrected the eminent British virologist Norman W. Price. She was right, and had the proof, but he would not accept it, even in the face of convincing evidence to the contrary.

April 22, 2007

Disappointing

This is an essential book. I rushed to it after finishing The Double Helix, by James Watson; I was incensed by Watson's misogyny and eager to learn the other side of the story. And this is the main accomplishment of Maddox's book, that it does give the other side of the story in a thorough and detailed manner. Too often, however, Maddox's tone slips into defensiveness, and her feminism appears to be a position she arrived at not as a result of rational thinking but because of her bitterness at the many injustices women have suffered at the hands of men.

I was troubled by this. I admire Rosalind Franklin -- yes, I have to admit that my admiration was nourished to a great extent by Maddox's book -- but I'm put off by how much of her biography of Franklin is a direct, self-righteous and self-justifying response to James Watson's flippant comments in The Double Helix. I was disappointed, for instance, by how much time Maddox spends explaining how sophisticated Franklin's taste in fashion was, simply because Watson made a snide comment in his book about Franklin's clothes and hairdo.

Another problem with Maddox's narrative is its pace. I found the book very hard to get through; paragraph after paragraph plods on, heavy with detail and almost empty of energy. I read The Double Helix in three days, breathless with excitement; for all its flaws, Watson's telling of the story sparkles. I don't look, when I read, to be entertained at the expense of truth, but I don't want either to be given the truth in a dry and awkward way. And Maddox's syntax is often awkward; I found myself going back again and again over her sentences to figure out what she was trying to say.

This material -- the story of Rosalind Franklin's life -- needs a better and more evenhanded writer, one who has nothing to prove and is aware that a biography, no matter how well-intentioned, can, just like the badly-intentioned ones, tell only one side of the story.
April 11, 2007

The most brilliant female British scientist of the 20th century

Probably the most meticulously researched biography I have ever read. Maddox`s accounts of the personalities, not only of Rosalind, but of all the famed scientists she came into contact with,are breatktaking. And Rosalind,herself,comes across as human and humane besides having a brilliant mind.
January 10, 2007

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA
by James D. Watson

Rosalind Franklin and DNA
by Anne Sayre, Anne Sayre

Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries, Second Edition
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The Third Man of the Double Helix: The Autobiography of Maurice Wilkins
by Maurice Wilkins

What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery
by Francis Crick