Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA

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 Because of her unpublished data and photographs, Francis Crick and James Watson were able to make the requisite connections.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. From The New England Journal of Medicine This biography illuminates one of the most mysterious protagonists in a fascinating story of fibers, photographs, and feelings, in which biology is revolutionized with the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Rosalind Franklin, Maddox's "dark lady of DNA," comes out of the shadows in a captivating three-part biography that chronicles a London childhood, studies at Cambridge University, mountaineering, and research in Paris; the discovery of the double helix; and success as a research team leader and international scientific acclaim, brought to an untimely end in 1958 by her death from ovarian cancer. The nub of this tale is well known. Franklin worked for Maurice Wilkins, a competitor, at King's College London. She obtained some of the finest x-ray-diffraction photographs from DNA fibers that have ever been recorded. These photographs, coupled with an understanding of x-ray diffraction and the chemistry of the four DNA bases (A, T, G, and C), held the key to the double helix. Without Franklin's knowledge, Wilkins showed her photographs to James Watson and Francis Crick. Franklin and Wilkins, who were equally equipped to have made the same discovery, independently published their own results alongside the Watson-Crick article describing the double helix, which revealed how DNA stores genetic information and passes it on to successive generations. (Crick, Watson, and Wilkins went on to share the Nobel prize in 1962. The Nobel Committee limits the number of winners to three and does not give posthumous awards.) It was not until publication of Watson's controversial book The Double Helix some 10 years after Franklin's tragic death at 37 years of age that the story became widely known. As Maddox describes it in an epilogue, entitled "Life after Death," what started as an embarrassment for Nathan Pusey, then president of Harvard University (whose press decided not to publish Watson's account, which went on to become a bestseller), served as a wake-up call for those who knew and respected Franklin's contributions to the discovery of the double helix. Today, on the 50th anniversary of this discovery, it is generally accepted that her now-famous x-ray-diffraction photograph number 51 played a critical part in the Watson-Crick discovery. Those who are familiar with the Nobel-prize trio and other dramatis personae, such as John Bernal, William Cochran, Carolyn Cohen, Isidore Fankuchen, John Finch, David Harker, Kenneth Holmes, Aaron Klug, Anthony North, Linus Pauling, Max Pertuz, John Randall, Anne and David Sayre, and Vladimir Vand, will not be able to put down parts two and three of Maddox's biography. The most interesting aspect of the story, however, is her account of Franklin's earlier years. Franklin was born in 1920 into an upper-middle-class banking family, which "stood high in Anglo-Jewry" -- part of the establishment to be sure, yet never fully English. She developed as an outsider. Early on, she declared herself a scientist (and, by implication, not a banker). Having been referred to as "alarmingly clever," she went up to Cambridge in 1938, where she found an institution that first admitted women in 1869 but would not grant them the degree of B.A. Two years after she received her Ph.D. in 1946 for internationally recognized research on coal, Franklin's undergraduate degree was awarded retroactively. Franklin's happiest times both professionally and personally were spent on the Continent. Her first research post took her to Paris, where she worked productively in the somewhat bohemian laboratory of Jacques Mering on the Left Bank, studying coal with x-rays. Socially, she became "unEnglished" (as D.H. Lawrence would say), feeling more at home in Paris than London. Franklin hiked and climbed extensively in the Alps, pursuing a passion that she had first indulged in Norway. Returning to the gloom and rationing of postwar London in 1950, she was once again thrown into a male-dominated scientific enclave for which she had no sympathy and little respect. Her professional relationship with Wilkins broke down immediately. The light at the end of the tunnel proved to be leadership of her own research team at Birkbeck College, where she shone x-rays on the other genetic material, RNA, realizing some of her enormous scientific potential. Maddox's biography sensitively chronicles Franklin's short, often unhappy life, putting the double-helix story into a rich, understandable human context. Far from being a tragic figure, Franklin emerges as a cultured scientist who was committed to excellence. As a structural biologist, I wish I had met Rosalind Franklin. Stephen K. Burley, M.D., D.Phil. Copyright © 2003 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS. From Booklist James Watson's blockbuster The Double Helix (1968) widened recognition of Rosalind Franklin, but he presented her as a stereotyped caricature. She was a would-be beauty except for her dowdy clothes, a volatile termagant to be avoided, except that Watson wanted something she had: X-ray images of DNA. In a much-needed corrective to Watson's portrayal, biographer Maddox elucidates Franklin's vital contribution to the discovery of DNA's structure, elaborates on her scientific achievements in virology, and creates a viable portrait of her reserved but self-confident personality. The latter element is Maddox's best contribution to her portrayal, for Franklin has become a symbol of victimhood for some feminists, an unsought role that does not fit the real Franklin, Maddox suggests. Franklin advanced far in biophysics in her scant 38 years of life, encountering condescending sexism but nothing that deterred her from pursuing a scientific career. This drive was interpreted by some, such as Watson, as a peremptory manner, but other scientists adored her and wept bitterly at her death from ovarian cancer in 1958. A finely crafted biography. Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “Maddox does justice to her subject as only the best biographers can.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review “Lively, absorbing and even handed … What emerges is the complex portrait of a passionate, flawed, courageous women.” — Washington Post Book World “Brenda Maddox has done a great service to science and history.” — San Francisco Chronicle Book Review “Thoughtful and engaging.” — Chicago Tribune “A sensitive, sympathetic look at a women whose life was greater than the sum if its parts.” — New York Times Book Review “An excellent biography … Maddox’s account of Franklin’s last years and premature death is moving and poignant.” — Women's Review of Books “In this sympathetic biography, Maddox …illuminates her subject as a gifted scientist and a complex woman.” — Publishers Weekly “Able, balanced and well researched.” — Science “Maddox does an excellent job of revisiting Franklin’s scientific contributions while revealing her complicated personality.” — Library Journal “A finely crafted biography.” — Booklist “A gripping yet nuanced account … a magnificent biography.” — The Independent “A joy to read.” — Sunday Telegraph “A meticulous biography…[Rosalind Franklin] was the unacknowledged heroine of DNA, the Sylvia Plath of molecular biology.” — The Economist “A vivid three-dimensional portrait of a sciencetist and human being … a moving biography.” — Daily Telegraph (London) Brenda Maddox is an award-winning biographer whose work has been translated into ten languages. Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, the Silver PEN Award, and the French Prix du Mailleur Livre Etranger. Her life of D. H. Lawrence won the Whitbread Biography Award in 1974, and Yeats's Ghosts, on the married life of W. B. Yeats, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 1998. She has been Home Affairs Editor for the Economist, has served as chairman of the Association of British Science Writers and is a member of the Royal Society's Science and Society Committee. She lives in London and Mid-Wales. Read more