To the end of her life, she wasn’t aware of the extent to which she’d been wronged. And yet later in life she became good friends with Watson and Crick, who were only too happy to exchange ideas with her on her work on viruses. Rosalind Franklin’s twenty-seven months at King’s College were indeed miserable, and gender was certainly one of the main reasons why it was so easy for her colleagues to dismiss her, condescend to her, or refuse to take her seriously. What choice did Watson have, then, but to take said data by force?īrenda Maddox’s compassionate and fair biography tells more than a straightforward story of bullying, harassment and gender discrimination – but then again, life is rarely as straightforward as that. To add insult to injury, James Watson’s bestselling account of the discovery, The Double Helix, portrays her as “Rosy”, a cartoonish witch ready to “strike men in her red hot anger” and who greedily hoarded data she couldn’t possibly make sense of. Moreover, Watson and Crick had illicit access to her data –a fact she must have suspected, but was never told to the end of her life.

But as Watson and Crick were later to admit, her X-Ray photographs of DNA were crucial for their discovery. However, Rosalind Franklin, Wilkins’ colleague at King’s College, was barely even acknowledged. Wilkins was included because it was more or less acknowledge that the work of the research group he led had paved the way for Crick and Watson’s final intuitive leap. In 1962, they were awarded a Noble Prize for this discovery, along with Maurice Wilkins from King’s College. She wasn’t “just” a competent lab technician – but sadly, even with all my questioning this was more or less what I’d come to believe.Ī little bit of context for those who might not be familiar with Franklin: James Watson and Francis Crick are the two scientists credited with the discovery that the structure of DNA is a double helix. I had never realised that she was such a good scientist in her own right, and that she did so much more than “help” Watson and Crick with their work. By the time she died, at only 37, she had made significant headway in three independent field of research.ĭespite everything I knew about the injustice of how Franklin was portrayed after her death, and despite my knowledge that women tend to be condescended to, this still surprised me. She then went on to work on the structure of coals, spent a little over two years working on DNA at King’s College in London, and later lead a research group that worked on viruses at Birkbeck College. Rosalind Franklin was born in 1920 to an Anglo-Jewish family and went to Cambridge at a time where women were not awarded degrees.

Rosalind Franklin – The Dark Lady of DNA is the story of the life of the woman whose work was pivotal for the discovery of the structure of DNA – but as Brenda Maddox is careful to point out, this was only one among Franklin’s many achievements.

Rosalind Franklin by Brenda Maddox