Rosalind Franklin: the dark lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox, HarperCollins, 拢20, ISBN 0002571498
HER scientific output was prodigious. Her crystallographic work at King鈥檚 College London was a crucial contribution to the double-helix model of DNA discovered by James Watson and Francis Crick. But in his bestselling The Double Helix, Watson portrayed Rosalind Franklin as a mean-spirited and priggish blight on the new biophysics group at King鈥檚. Franklin had died of cancer long before the book was published, and her friends and feminists mounted a riposte that presented her as a secular saint: a scientific genius, a kind and generous woman tough only in response to misogyny, and a martyr to science.
So who was the real Rosalind Franklin? Brenda Maddox鈥檚 biography, rather than striking a happy medium, argues that both portraits do some justice to a complex woman. Franklin came from a wealthy and not very warm Jewish family, and after public school and Cambridge she took up a research post in Paris where she worked on the properties of coals.
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Her spirits flagged when she returned to postwar London to join the DNA team at King鈥檚. In 1951 King鈥檚 was still a bomb site, and new battles broke out as an opaque hierarchy, clumsy management and personality clashes splintered the group. Franklin vigorously guarded her resources, and colleagues stopped daring to borrow equipment. But she was extremely supportive of her assistants, some of whom carried on surreptitious diplomacy across the rifts.
Her senior colleague Maurice Wilkins was making headway with the DNA structure, and Franklin鈥檚 X-ray diffraction images added crucial data, but the two couldn鈥檛 find a way to get along. Eventually, they avoided each other. Thus what ought to have been their common property 鈥� their DNA data 鈥� became personal property.
So when Wilkins showed Watson one of Franklin鈥檚 images, he became the villain in later versions of the story. At the time, though, Franklin either didn鈥檛 know or didn鈥檛 mind. She was leaving King鈥檚 and was keen to move on.
She transferred to Birkbeck College, where she worked fruitfully on viruses in a stimulating if tatty environment. She nurtured her team of young researchers, who became devoted to her. But when a technician asked her for leave to study for an exam, she derided his academic ambitions and refused his request (he later enjoyed a successful scientific career). She ignored colleagues when they passed her on the stairs, and yet she threw lively parties at her home 鈥� and caused a sensation one evening by gliding down from her office wearing an evening gown and disappearing into a limousine.
When she was diagnosed with cancer, Franklin kept it private. Maddox gives a moving description of her decline. Crick, Watson and Wilkins鈥檚 Nobel Prize for DNA structure was awarded after her death. Ever since, Franklin鈥檚 story has served many ends.
This book is another riposte, and capitalises on the iconic tales. A brief prologue sets the scene, half of which concerns the reconstructed stories that brought Franklin fame in her second 鈥渓ife鈥� after death. These inform the story throughout, although they are discussed only in the final chapter.
It鈥檚 vital to keep a sense of perspective when reading these reconstructions. For example, Maddox accuses Wilkins of forever branding Franklin as the 鈥渄ark lady鈥�, a description he used privately to Crick in 1953. But it is surely the scriptwriters, Maddox included, of Franklin鈥檚 afterlife who have branded her, by conferring visibility and longevity on Wilkins鈥檚 remark.
Maddox tells an exhilarating and vivid tale of scientific and personal politics at a time of rapid change in British science. Franklin emerges as a difficult person whose generosity was clear, but only to some. It鈥檚 sad that the life story of this very private person has been batted about in public in the service of various agendas. This biography acknowledges the controversy and interest in the tale, but finds a way nevertheless to offer a convincing and deeply human portrayal of a very talented scientist.