ROSALIND FRANKLIN: THE DARK LADY OF DNA

By Brenda Maddox

400 pages. New York: HarperCollins. $29.95

The New York Times Book Review

September 29, 2002

By Robin Marantz Henig

          In the story of the discovery of the structure of DNA, James Watson stars as the American whiz kid besotted with pretty girls and with making a name for himself; his British co-star, Francis Crick, is a bit older, a bit more refined, but still a renegade who can’t quite earn a PhD because he can’t quite settle down to a single field of study.  The action takes place in England, in the men’s cramped shared office at Cambridge University, and at the nearby Eagle Pub where, fortified with ale, they seem to do their best thinking.  Hovering in the background is the shadowy Maurice Wilkins, half rival, half collaborator, who works in his own cramped room at King’s College London, taking x-rays of the crystal form of DNA to intuit its shape.  And all but airbrushed out of the picture is Wilkins’ colleague Rosalind Franklin, whom Wilkins takes to calling “our dark lady.”

          Dark, indeed.  If Wilkins could have had his way, at least according to the newest version of the legend laid out in Brenda Maddox’s Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, he would have rendered Franklin dark to the point of oblivion.  He and she never got along.  He seemed to think she was there to do x-ray crystallography as his assistant, not his equal; she seemed to think he was incapable of accepting a woman as an intellectual peer.

          The bottom line is that Franklin was miserable at King’s, and stayed for just 27 months before moving on to a more collegial lab.  But during those 27 months, she managed to take some of the world’s most lucid x-ray photographs of crystallized DNA – photographs that, once Crick and Watson got an unauthorized peek at them, made the double helix structure of the molecule perfectly clear.

          In the fifty years since the publication of the discovery of the double helix in April 1953, Franklin has been eulogized, vilified, lionized.  She died of ovarian cancer in 1958, at the age of 37.  She was overlooked for the Nobel Prize, which was awarded in 1962 to Watson, Crick, and, inexplicably, Wilkins.  Then she was turned into a character in James Watson’s 1968 memoir The Double Helix – a book so hyperbolic that Wilkins took to calling it “Jim’s novel.”  Watson cast Franklin as a spinster, a frump, a sexually repressed, unimaginative plodder who didn’t understand the value of her data, hoarded it anyway, and had little use for men.  Her friends were horrified by the caricature, but Rosalind Franklin was dead, unable to clear her name.

          More recently Franklin has become, as Maddox puts it, “the Sylvia Plath of molecular biology.”  The path toward this dubious distinction began in 1974, when Franklin’s friend Anne Sayre wrote Rosalind Franklin and DNA in an apparent attempt to restore her reputation as a brilliant scientist and a vivacious, adventurous woman.  By portraying the key players in the DNA discovery drama in black and white, Sayre turned Franklin into a feminist icon, someone robbed not only of her data, but of her Nobel Prize, all because of the deep-rooted sexism of science.

          But the truth about Franklin is, like any truth, far more interesting than stark black and white.  Shades of gray are Maddox’s palette in her Rosalind Franklin, and she uses them judiciously to paint a portrait of a complex, contradictory, fiercely passionate and passionately fierce woman whose true place in scientific history is still open to debate.

          Franklin wasn’t a man-hating harpy, but neither was she an easy woman to know or to like.  She was stiff and mercurial; when she felt denigrated or unappreciated, she turned “abrupt and peremptory,”  with a sharp, caustic  “spikiness” that turned people against her.  But when she was happy, off on one of her many hiking trips through Europe, throwing lavish dinner parties in her flat or visiting with friends, Rosalind Franklin could be clever, sparkling, beautiful, provocative – in short, a sheer delight.

          The more difficult moments were many, however, no doubt partly caused by the trouble women had being taken seriously in science, especially in Franklin’s field, physical chemistry.  These difficult moments hardened her into a rigid, meticulous, somewhat unimaginative scientist.  She probably knew what her beautiful x-rays of DNA implied about the molecule’s shape, but her strict self-discipline kept her from publishing or even uttering theories until all the experimental x-ray evidence was in.  In her view, building models of the DNA molecule – the playful, tinker-toy approach to the problem that ultimately proved successful for Watson and Crick – was the last step in the process, not the first. The first was accumulating data in the form of x-ray photographs of crystallized DNA.

          “If she had felt very confident and supported,” Maddox writes, “she might have been able to make outrageous leaps of imagination.”  As it was, given her cautious temperament, her hostile work environment, and her scientific training, such leaps “would have been as out of character as running up an overdraft or wearing a red strapless dress.”

          But while Franklin was proceeding cautiously, Wilkins was double-crossing her.  In late January 1953, he showed her best DNA photographs to Crick and Watson without her consent, thereby giving them the evidence they needed – including accurate measurements of the molecule’s diameter, length, and slope – to uncover the secrets of DNA.   By March, the puzzle was solved, and Watson and Crick failed to grant Franklin the full credit she deserved.  This is the thievery for which Franklin has become a feminist cause célèbre.

          Franklin’s personal life was stolen from her, too, Maddox writes, in what might have been the bigger thievery.  While her evenings and holidays were filled with rich conversation, elegant parties, outdoor adventure, and international travel, she seems never to have managed a full-blown, satisfying romance.  She never married, probably never had sex (although that is left delicately vague), and  wasted years yearning for the love of her life, Jacques Mering, the married director of the state-run Laboratoire Central in Paris where she had worked in her early twenties, who did not love her back.  By the time she met Don Caspar, another scientific soulmate – who, unlike Mering, was unmarried, available, and interested – she was already dying. 

          Franklin’s death, a model of courage and poignancy, forced an urgency to her work on the tobacco mosaic virus, which she studied in hopes of understanding DNA’s close chemical cousin, RNA.  Once again, because of some preternatural skill, the photos Franklin took of crystallized tobacco mosaic virus were breathtaking, among the clearest photos of the virus ever taken.

          Despite the vivid descriptions of the science and the setting, and the ample use of plot, character, and telling details that are the secrets of good narrative writing, this book is in the end oddly colorless – perhaps because the contradictory nature of the subject requires Maddox to keep returning to those shades of gray.  Still, it is a sensitive, sympathetic look at a woman whose life was greater than the sum of its parts – a woman we might have cared little about had not one of those parts been exaggerated by a couple of immature men who were otherwise engaged, showily trying to outdo each other in a race to figure out the secret of life.