The Dark Lady of DNA

Review of Rosalind Franklin "The Dark Lady of DNA" by Brenda Maddox

I found this book to be both an even handed and compassionate story of the life of Rosalind Franklin, an often misunderstood figure in the DNA story. The book paints a picture of Rosalind Franklin as being brought up in an upper class English jewish family. She learned quite early to hide her feelings, fiercely defend her opinions, become intolerant of fools, and to quite easily fall into a siege mentality if she was around people that she didn't like. On the other hand, she could be quite compassionate and generous at times. She loved to walk in the mountains and was very adventurous. She had a contentious relationship with her father.

The most interesting facts that I took home from this book was that Watson and Crick were given a glimpse at Franklin's results in which she described her observations and measurements from X-ray diffraction stuides of DNA crystals from which she determined the position the phosphate (groups outside rather than inside the molecule), as well as the stacking distance between the nucleotides (34 angstroms). Watson and Crick were shown a report by Max Perutz (then group head at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England where Franklin was a staff scientist. Apparently, these observations including the quality of Franklin's famous X-ray diffraction films of the B-form of DNA, greatly helped Watson and Crick in building a model of. Franklin X-ray film clearly indicted a recognizable pattern to them that the DNA molecule was a double helix. At that time it was disputed whether DNA was a double or triple helix. In fact, the Nobel prize winning chemist, Linus Pauling had prematurely published claiming the triple helix model.

Watson and Crick eventually solved the structure and published their results in Nature in 1953. However, they never told Rosalind Franklin that they had used her results in determining the structure even though Watson and Crick conferred with Franklin on other projects over the years (e.g. determining the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus). In fact, Franklin was on quite friendly terms with Crick and greatly valued his judgement. The reason for them keeping this a secret from her remains an unexplained mystery although Watson and Crick had acknowledged their debt to her much later on. Franklin died at the age of 38 of ovarian cancer. Had she lived she would most probably have shared the Nobel prize along Watson, Crick, Maurice Wilkins (her boss at the time).

I warmly recommend this highly readable book that touchingly shows the passion, conflicts, triumph, and sadness behind a great scientific discovery.