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Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA
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Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Well written account of a scientist who is now famous
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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. |
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