"This book will set straight the record of Franklin's life."
Next spring sees the 50th anniversary of the publication of the description of the double-helical structure of DNA in Nature by James Watson and Francis Crick. This article laid the foundation for our understanding of the expression and transmission of genetic information. Two adjacent articles - one by Maurice Wilkins, Alec Stokes and Herbert Wilson and the other by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling - described the experimental evidence for this structure. This evidence was contained in X-ray diffraction photographs of DNA fibres. Within a decade, Watson, Crick and Wilkins had been awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for this work. Franklin, however, was not a recipient. Sadly, she had died of cancer four years earlier at the age of just 37.
But there is more to this story than this simple description implies. Apparently Wilkins had shown Watson one of Franklin's diffraction photographs - without her knowledge. It was this picture that made it clear to Watson that DNA has a helical structure. As Watson later wrote: "The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race". Watson and Crick were also given a research report that detailed Franklin's work. As a result, they were able to propose the DNA model before she did.
Worse was yet to come. Watson's 1968 book The Double Helix, which was published long after Franklin's death, consistently described Franklin in an unflattering manner. He wrote, for example, that "her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents" and claimed that she had "a sharp, stubborn mind, caught in her self-made anti-helical trap". In an epilogue to the book, Watson claimed that he had changed his view of her, but did not alter his remarks in the main text.
The Double Helix, which was a best-seller, revealed Franklin as a female scientist who had been cheated of her greatly deserved place in scientific history. Maddox quotes from the New Statesman that Franklin's life was that of "a brilliant woman trying to make her way in a man's world, having her work used behind her back, and finally being misrepresented in a book published when she was no longer alive to reply".
Maddox's biography of Franklin is marvellous to read. I could not put it down once I started it. Along with Anne Sayre's compelling description of Franklin's work in Rosalind Franklin and DNA(1975 W W Norton), the book will help to set straight the record of her life.
So who was this woman who was so wronged? And what was her background?
Maddox has researched these topics carefully and provides us with a valuable description of Franklin's life.
Read the full review in December’s issue of Physics World.