Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady Of DNA (2003) - Plot & Excerpts
In 1962, James Watson, Frances Crick and Maurice Wilkins received a Nobel Prize for discovering the double helix of DNA. A few years later Watson published a book The Double Helix, chronicling his race to discovery as well as exploring the other contenders. One of these contenders was Rosalind Franklin, mockingly referred to as Rosy, who is depicted as stubborn, angry, ignorant and dowdy. Those who knew her were shocked and angered by Watson’s portrayal, especially as Rosalind was no longer alive to defend herself. Taking up the case is Brenda Maddox. In her book Rosalind Franklin the Dark Lady of DNA, she aims to give a credible and accurate account of Rosalind’s life, while educating adults interested in the discovery of DNA on the woman who was overlooked.In biology class, we inevitably cover DNA. During the unit, teachers almost always mention Watson and Crick who identified the structure of DNA. A few teachers may give a brief nod to Rosalind Franklin, mention how her work played a part in the discovery or even admit she was robbed of a Nobel Prize. My teacher was one of such teachers. Immediately curious about the woman biology wronged, I set out to learn who this Rosalind Franklin was and what role she played in the discovery of DNA.The biography covers in detail Rosalind’s life from her childhood through her death. It discusses her life at boarding school and college at Cambridge, then follows her work from London to Paris back to London, across the United States and throughout Europe. Stress is put on Rosalind’s Jewish background, her personality, and her relationships in and outside of work. The book narrates the famous Cavendish/King’s College race and Rosalind’s struggle with cancer.Maddox also focuses on Rosalind’s personality. While “Watson portrays Rosalind’s ‘hot anger’ as entirely unmotivated” Maddox offers insight and explanation (194). Rosalind was struggling to pave her way in a male-dominated field. She “was engaged in a race against time”, found her notebooks being read, had to publish a certain amount of papers while mentoring a graduate student and her coworkers didn’t like her. This resulted in her being completely engaged in work, and somewhat uptight with some anger due to stress. Maddox is able to support her claim well, gives numerous examples of Rosalind’s personality in out of the lab, getting readers to understand what Watson did not.Maddox takes a third person view on the life of Rosalind -which is completely necessary in any biography- but also distances the reader from the subjects. In an ideal biography, the reader would feel like an observer to the subject’s life, but in this case Maddox falls into a variety of traps, constantly reminding the reader that this is a book. For instance, Maddox uses parentheses generously, often containing six lines of text within a single parenthesis “(According to the International x-ray Tables, crystals are classified by their symmetry- that is, the shape of their unit cell- into 230 space groups. Prepared by W.T. Astbury of Leeds, with Kathleen Lonsdale, at the Royal Institution and published in 1924, the tables were, in Rosalind’s time, the crystallographer’s Bible).” (175). This is a common example of overuse. Parentheses are meant to be used as a side note, and with side notes that long, readers get distracted from the plot line. In addition, extra names, places and dates confuse readers and are usually just extraneous information.There is also the slight problem of untranslated languages. Maddox leaves sentences in French or occasionally German- “la journee de heir a ete magnifique” (302) or “mer de nuages” (98) then discusses the sentences meaning without telling the readers what the sentence actually means. Maddox will occasionally throw in a French word like “chercheurs” (87) and “les gens de Chez Solange” (92) and leave the reader to translate the definition. As I do not speak French, this got quite irritating.Minor characters are often presented with lengthy introduction; Maddox goes into detail about the lives of all who surround Rosalind. This is unnecessary and bogs down the reader with too many characters to keep track of. The audience must keep tabs on Rosalind’s family, (including cousins, aunts and uncles), friends from childhood through adulthood, co-workers, bosses, rivals and just people who were doing similar research at the time. After being introduced the first time, these characters often pop up again with no introduction, leaving the reader bewildered and wishing they had a list of characters.However, Maddox is successful in a few aspects. She inserts parts of letters and conversations to add a more personal view of Rosalind and her surroundings. Every few pages there is part of a letter, giving the chance for readers to enjoy the emotions and thoughts of the people actually going through the events they are reading about. Maddox inserts descriptions of landscapes and surroundings which add visualization to the text. In addition, there is copious detail, showing the biography was very well researched. It sports 12 pages of notes referencing personal interviews and collected letters as well as a 9 page bibliography.I also applaud Maddox for interspersing gossip-like details into rather dry parts of the book. These gossipy bits may be less accurate than accounts of Rosalind’s work, but they added a level of interest to keep the reader involved. We were privy to Rosalind’s secrets, her yearning for Jacques Mering, her possible love for Don Caspar, her desire to be a parent and the tension with Maurice Wilkins.Despite these interesting parts,the book as a whole did not hold my attention. The premise was interesting but the plot got chained down by details, names, dates, places and facts. In addition, there were a few lines that I found offensive such as “but the male fear of the female has always been absurd- the stronger afraid of the weaker- but no less real for that” (194). I disagree with Maddox’s generalization that man is both stronger than female and it is absurd to be afraid of them. Characters other than Rosalind are too static and distant from the reader. Maddox succeeded in her goal of portraying Rosalind as a great scientist, but she didn’t do it in an interesting way.
Rosalind Franklin is most remembered now as the unsung fourth contributor who found the evidence for Watson and Crick’s double-helix paper in the early 1950s. A brilliant experimentalist, Franklin actually made advances in three significant areas in her short life (she died of cancer at the age of 37): the understanding of coal, the shape of the DNA molecule, and the way RNA functions inside viruses.A few notes about Maddox’s book and this remarkable scientist: Franklin’s specialty was x-ray photography, a science that was used to analyze the shape of molecules and particles somehow. Thankfully, Maddox spends very little time on the minutiae of how these discoveries work, focusing instead on explaining the broad outlines of what Franklin discovered. She made her name in this field by studying coal, particularly in her discovery that there were some kinds of coal that never turned into graphite no matter how hot they were heated. In the last four years of her life, Franklin made big advances in the study of viruses, findings that ultimately may have been more significant for the fact that they weren’t at such a heated centerpoint of debate. Indeed, someone else would have proven the double-helix within a short time if Franklin hadn’t been doing that work. Her virus work was more singular. Franklin has been characterized as abrupt and cold, aggressive and unable to converse easily. At the same time, she’s described as caring and heartfelt, passionate and humane. While these perspectives seem at odds, Maddox describes most of the abrupt personality as tied to her workplace demeanor, while her warmer side was reserved for casual time. Maddox suggests that her upbringing fostered a defensiveness that may have contributed to this persona she adopted. (Apparently, Franklin was particularly sensitive to anything she thought was anti-Semitic, even if the suspicions were groundless.) In the last couple years of her life, Franklin gained significant recognition for her work, and did two tours of the US, where she met scientists in labs all over the country. I was interested to read that she spent some time at Cold Spring Harbor, which was the research home for Barbara McClintock in that same era. I like to imagine that they met one another.The most debated period of her life stems from her short stint at King’s college, where she and a postgrad were working on x-ray photography of DNA. At the same time, Watson and Crick were up the street at Cambridge, trying to model the structure of DNA. Franklin’s colleague at King’s, Wilkins, was also working on the problem, but didn’t have Franklin’s technical skill with x-ray photography. Thus, when he wanted her to collaborate with him and share information with Watson and Crick, she became defensive and territorial, feeling like a less talented superior was trying to mooch her hard-won data. Her approach was that models could not prove anything, thatdata was needed in order to prove their case, so she pursued her data. Then Wilkins shared her data with Watson and Crick without her permission, when it was quite clear that she would not have wanted him to. Her data led to their breakthrough, and within months they had staked their claim to the theory.While she and Wilkins were acknowledged as contributors in the notes of their paper, Watson and Crick didn’t give them co-author status. But while Franklin may have felt upset, Maddox points out that she didn’t seem to have any particular anger or grudge over the issue. Indeed, she was just happy to get away to Birkbeck and begin her research on viruses. In the years between Watson and Crick’s paper (March 1953) and her own death (April 1958), she carried on a friendly correspondence with both Watson and Crick, going so far as to spend time in a social context with each and maintain a rather hearty work relationship with Watson.This continued collegiality makes what happened after Franklin’s death so strange. When Watson wrote his novelistic adventurous tale, The Double Helix, Rosalind appears as a shrewish hoarder, obstinately refusing to share her data but also intellectually incapable of making proper use of it, practicallyforcing Watson and Crick to sneak a peek. Both Crick and Watson maintained, for a long time, a recognition that her data was crucial to their solution, but withholding proper credit for her work. Other people in the community were shocked and angered at this portrayal and have, in various places, defended her vigorously; so much so, in fact, that she has become very well known for the unfair treatment she had from Watson and Crick. Maddox suggests that perhaps their portrayals of her stem from a deep unresolved guilt about having used her data without her knowledge, and then never really getting the chance to share that credit later on.Maddox does a great job of presenting Franklin’s life in an even-handed way. She’s fair to Watson without flinching at his missteps and lies, but she also acknowledges where Franklin’s own personality foibles exacerbated occasional problems with colleagues. This is an excellent book, a strong biography with good storytelling and research. The second half is better than the first, starting about the time she arrives at King’s college (no surprise that the controversy is the most interesting, I suppose).
What do You think about Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady Of DNA (2003)?
After reading “Spinster” by Kate Bolick, I decided to find my own awakeners. Since I have Ph.D. in Genetics, I started with Rosalind Franklin.Brenda Maddox has written a very engaging book about the woman who took the X-ray crystallography photograph that lead to the discovery of the structure of DNA. I had heard about her during my Ph.D. studies, but Ms. Maddox has fleshed out this multi-faceted, intelligent, and driven woman. Although she could be hard to deal with at work, Rosalind Franklin was known for giving wonderful dinner parties and was very kind to her friends’ children. She worked very hard, but made time to go on hiking holidays in the mountains.Rosalind Franklin faced a lot of challenges being a woman in science in the 1950’s. I was glad to read in this book that she wasn’t the only woman in science at the time, and she had many female colleagues Also there were male colleagues keen on helping women excel in their fields.As a scientist, it was interesting to read how things were done then without the aid of computers. I can’t imagine doing all of her calculations by hand. It took years to make discoveries that these days take weeks. This is a wonderful book about a very interesting woman and I highly recommend it.
—Carol Palmer
Lately I have not been a fan of biographies or autobiographies, it seems like everywhere I turn these days I see one about someone who is grabbing their fifteen minutes of fame after only being famous 'just for being famous' and if they do claim to write it, I always believe that some ghost-write is paid to write the book instead. Since I have been pushing myself to try and read more non-fiction, I tried this one since it was picked for the group non-fiction in my book group. Before I picked this up, I did not have much interest in science or DNA despite being quite good at it at school but I had never heard of Rosalind Franklin before. Despite only having a very basic understanding of science, I found the scienitific content in the book quite easy to understand. At some points through reading this I did find the book somewhat just thrown together with the personal and the scientific document but nonetheless I did find it interesting as I felt I was really getting a feel for Franklin's character. I'm glad I picked this book up to read, I would seriously recommend it to anyone with any interest in science and DNA.
—Alannah Clarke
Rosalind Franklin was a scientist maligned by male colleagues and then forgotten by history. Brenda Maddox rights these wrongs in delivering this interesting biography of a British scientist born in 1920 to a rich Jewish family, who died at age 37 from cancer. Despite her early death, Dr. Franklin published scientific papers prolifically in both coal studies and in virus research, it's a tragedy that she wasn't able to live longer and discover more. Although Dr. Franklin's meticulous research and brilliant photography were crucial to the discovery of DNA's design, her contributions were highjacked by male peers Wilkins, Crick and Watson. In the sexist spirit of their time, they made fun of her behind her back, slandered her, and eventually ran off with the Nobel Prize without acknowledging her help.The hardcore science covered in this book is supported by photos and illustrations that go far in conveying basic principles to a non-science reader like myself. What I really enjoyed learning about was "The Cousinhood," and other elements of Jewish Geography relating to the Ashkenazis of northern Europe, their intermarriage, wealth, and global influence through banking, publishing, and science.
—Emi Bevacqua
