Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA [Hardcover]

Brenda Maddox (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2002

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 Franklin's unpublished data and crucial photograph of DNA had already been seen by her competitors at the Cambridge University lab.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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (October 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060184078
• ISBN-13: 978-0060184070
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #828,027 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fine biography of one of the great crystallographers, April 11, 2004

By 

Bosco Ho (San Francisco, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (Paperback)

I was initially drawn to this book (as will most other readers I imagine) by the controversy surrounding Rosalind Franklin in the discovery of the structure of the DNA helix. Instead, I was undeservingly rewarded with a fine biography of a character every bit as complex and fascinating as a heroine in a Henry James novel: a rich, head-strong English Jewish girl, blessed with a burning passion for science, talented but trapped in the chauvinistic world of post-war English science. She spent her life split between the sunny sophistication of France and the sobriety of England. Her professional life occurred through the Second World War, and the post-war period, providing a rich background for the biography.

On the DNA controversy, Brenda Fox gives the most compelling account that I have read of what actually happened: if anything, Franklin was a victim of the fractious atmosphere created by J.T. Randall, head of the department of Biophysics at King's college. By not clarifying the working relations between Wilkins, Franklin and their students, Randall deliberately created an ugly turf war. That Watson and Crick got to see her data was a result of confusion rather than espionage.

Yet, the question is often raised that Franklin was not capable of solving the structure on her own. To answer that question, one only has to follow her later career to find out that she was truly one of the great crystallographers. Her elucidation of the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus was a technical achievement easily rivalling that of DNA, and might have led to a Nobel-prize if not for her early death. Indeed, her junior collaborator on the mosaic virus, Aaron Klug, would go on to win a Nobel prize himself, citing Franklin as his greatest mentor in his Nobel-prize speech (a high honour amongst scientists). Brenda Fox unearths a voluminous amount of material, which shows that Franklin was careful rather than unimaginative, as some have claimed. In a more supportive atmosphere, Franklin would have solved the DNA structure herself. However, Watson and Crick built on so many of Franklin's results (that DNA was helical, that the phosphates are on the outside, that there are 2 forms of DNA) that the real scandal is that they lied in their paper about having come to the model through pure theory alone.

Brenda Fox paints a magnetic portrait of Franklin - a woman who was alternatively gregarious and witty, with a penchant for all things French (a very fine prejudice indeed), yet was also cold, hostile and aristocratically overbearing. Her relations with the men in her life were complex and dissected with sympathetic acumen by Brenda Fox. In short, I came away with the impression that Rosalind Franklin was someone I would have liked to have known. I can think of no greater praise for a biography than that.

p.s. just a little note to a previous reviewer: crystallography in proteins is alive and well: the 2003 Chemistry Nobel-prize went to Rod McKinnon for the crystal structure of the potassium channel, in 1997, it went to John Walker for the structure of ATP-synthase.

70 of 78 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Franklin's real biography, October 15, 2002

By 

K. M. Pollard "PhD" (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (Hardcover)

Brenda Maddox does a masterful job of laying out the life story of Rosalind Franklin, the supposed "forgotten lady of DNA". This biography is far superior to the personal vendetta waged against J D Watson on Franklin's behalf by Anne Sayre (see my comments on "Rosalind Franklin and DNA" by Anne Sayre).

Rosalind Franklin is the King's College scientist who obtained the x-ray photograph of the B form of DNA which was an important piece of information in the eventual description of a model of the structure of DNA that was described by J D Watson and FHC Crick in 1953, and for which they, along with Maurice Wilkins, won the Nobel Prize. Much has been written about whether Franklin was robbed of credit for her DNA contribution, whether she would have determined the structure by herself, and whether she would have shared in the Nobel. Whether these things are true or may have come to pass is difficult to say. Franklin died in 1958 and without her answers to some of these questions we are only left to speculate.

However Maddox leaves little speculation about who Rosalind Franklin was. This is a model biography of a true pioneer and an excellent role model for those seeking a career in the sciences. My own career was greatly influenced by Watson's personal account of the description of the model DNA structure he and Crick proposed. At that time (1971) I was more taken with the intuitive thinking displayed by the protagonists and their after hours antics than by the portrayal of "Rosy". In following years I have read Sayre and also Crick and others and have been somewhat bemused by the situation that surrounds Franklin and DNA, perhaps because it is almost all personal opinion and speculation. Maddox's picture is none of this. Her book is the description of a talented, strong-willed, opinioned female scientist and yes, a feminist. There is little doubt that Franklin made significant scientific contributions. There is also little doubt that she was emotionally immature and fragile. There is even less doubt that she died far, far, far too young but with great dignity and spirit. The first chapters on the pre-Rosalind history of the Franklin's is slow going but the reader is more than compensated by the final chapters that touchingly describe Franklin's last months. In her last few years we see a woman making her place in a man's world, and doing it very successfully. Her emotional life may even have been close to being fulfilled. But abdominal pains herald the beginning of repeated cancer treatments which culminate in her death before her work on viral structure was to be displayed in exhibition. Watson's book is fun, an easy read about how science is done (by some) but Rosalind's story is filled with overwhelming emotion about how a life was lived and cut short. She was robbed of the only real prize - life.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Science for the love of it, not the glory., December 11, 2002

By 

Charles W. Garner (Abilene, Texas USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (Hardcover)

A story of an unmarried Jewish woman in a man's world of science. The biography of Rosalind Franklin opens the book on a well-to-do Jewish family in the UK, revealing some of the deep-seated pressures and motivations driving this remarkable experimentalist. As a Biochemist, I now appreciate the fact that there is more to the discovery of the double helix than you will read about in The Double Helix. Indeed, the discovery of the double helix may be a 50 year-old example paralleling today's insider trading. The discovery of the double helix is the story of how someone is presented with the unpublished data of Rosalind Franklin (the acknowledged key to the structure of DNA)and "sells" the product to the world without her permission or knowledge. Warning: this book may change your perspective. I could not put this book down.