Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA
Book Review: Well written account of a scientist who is now famous
Summary: 4 Stars
One of the more extraordinary things that has happened over the last 20 years or so is the lionization of a woman who until now was almost entirely unheard of in the world at large. Maurice Wilkins too was once almost unheard of, even though he shared the Nobel with Watson and Crick for the discovery/elucidation of the structure of DNA. Rosalind Franklin has now probably leapfrogged Wilkins into being one of the legendary scientists of the 20th century. This is all part of the way the media to a certain extent gets hold of an apparently "good story" and runs with it.
In this excellently written book, Brenda Maddox lays out Rosalind Franklin's short life very well, managing to make what could indeed have been excruitiatingly boring into something that succeeds in holding your attention very well. I knew Maurice Wilkins and some of the other characters in the book, so perhaps I am not the ideal dispassionate observer, but I fully expected to be a little bored by the book. I don't really have anything else to say about the now-famous Photograph 51 which James Watson saw, as no doubt this part of the story will run and run. All I will say is that Maddox points out that Franklin disliked her time at King's and was only too delighted to move to Birkbeck and that DNA was something associated with that group which, to put it simply, she was probably only too happy to leave to others to fight over. Certainly she found a very good research group at Birkbeck and her TMV work, and the results that came from it later after her death, are in the textbooks just like the structure of DNA.
Maddox could have made this into a martyr's story but she succeeds very well in pointing out the iniquities of patriachy in the science of the time, without making Franklin into a victim, because, as she shows, Franklin would no doubt not have seen it this way. In fact Franklin comes over as "difficult" to many (mainly UK) scientists, but to foreigners often delightful. Maddox suggests this has something to do with her Jewishness, which is quite plausible, but I think also is not an uncommon trait among many Britons who share Dr. Johnson's view that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel", producing a nostalgia and yearning for a people and culture that are not your own.
In the end my main feeling engendered by reading the book was of sadness -for her early death, but also because she seemed to find it difficult to get along with many people and hence experienced more than her share of unhappiness and difficulties in her personal and professional life.
As so often with scientific biographies I wish there had been more science in the book. It is very difficult for us today to appreciate the problem of finding the structure of DNA and what exactly were the thought processes behind getting the double helix. This is something that Watson's book succeeds in brilliantly despite its flaws. Certainly Watson (almost as usual) comes off poorly when you consider that he wrote unflattering things about Franklin after he had been her friend for the last few years of her life (or at least a good colleague) and knew that what he was writing was unfair. Who knows what he thought about the other protagonists but was constrained to reign in his thoughts as they were still alive, unlike Franklin who was no longer around to fight back?
I have to say I am one of those who laments the hold the Nobel Prizes have on the public's imagination. Science is a collective enterprise and prize giving is often unfair, wrong or misleading.
Book Review: Scientists at work.
Summary: 4 Stars
After reading the book it is clear the scientific community is both collegial and cut throat. In Franklin's case, the lure of honor compels a fellow scientist to use Rosalind's research without giving her the credit she deserved in uncovering the structure of DNA. Maddox provides insight into the not always amicable inner workings of a research lab and the psychology of scientists.
As an elite, Jewish, female Francophile, Franklin was not an easy person to get along with, especially in the lab at King's College London under Dr. Randall. If she had a difficult personality though, she was anything but shy and certainly was not politically naive. She held her own in a male dominated environment and perhaps this is the reason she become known as the Dark Lady. Maddox does her best to give Franklin a balanced appraisal.
Scientists share information and materials through attendance at conferences and in social settings and keeping up with each other's work is expected. But, the use of Rosalind's unpublished material (the crucial photo 51 and experimental data) without her knowledge, to make a breakthrough discovery, is of questionable ethics.
The author presents some insight into the mentality of the scientist. She quotes Albert Einstein, "that a scientist makes science `the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the whirlpool of personal experience.'"(32). To Rosalind "science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated."(61) Is this why she found it so difficult to explain her work to family and friends? They simply could not understand?
Maddox notes: "it can be argued that scientific discovery is not creativity in the sense that artistic composition is. `Science differs from other realms of human endeavor in that its substance does not derive from the activity of those who practice it'"(213) Therefore it is interesting when an eminent scientist is caught in the trap of his own beliefs and exposed. This occurred when Rosalind corrected the eminent British virologist Norman W. Price. She was right, and had the proof, but he would not accept it, even in the face of convincing evidence to the contrary.
Book Review: Disappointing
Summary: 2 Stars
This is an essential book. I rushed to it after finishing The Double Helix, by James Watson; I was incensed by Watson's misogyny and eager to learn the other side of the story. And this is the main accomplishment of Maddox's book, that it does give the other side of the story in a thorough and detailed manner. Too often, however, Maddox's tone slips into defensiveness, and her feminism appears to be a position she arrived at not as a result of rational thinking but because of her bitterness at the many injustices women have suffered at the hands of men.
I was troubled by this. I admire Rosalind Franklin -- yes, I have to admit that my admiration was nourished to a great extent by Maddox's book -- but I'm put off by how much of her biography of Franklin is a direct, self-righteous and self-justifying response to James Watson's flippant comments in The Double Helix. I was disappointed, for instance, by how much time Maddox spends explaining how sophisticated Franklin's taste in fashion was, simply because Watson made a snide comment in his book about Franklin's clothes and hairdo.
Another problem with Maddox's narrative is its pace. I found the book very hard to get through; paragraph after paragraph plods on, heavy with detail and almost empty of energy. I read The Double Helix in three days, breathless with excitement; for all its flaws, Watson's telling of the story sparkles. I don't look, when I read, to be entertained at the expense of truth, but I don't want either to be given the truth in a dry and awkward way. And Maddox's syntax is often awkward; I found myself going back again and again over her sentences to figure out what she was trying to say.
This material -- the story of Rosalind Franklin's life -- needs a better and more evenhanded writer, one who has nothing to prove and is aware that a biography, no matter how well-intentioned, can, just like the badly-intentioned ones, tell only one side of the story.
Book Review: The most brilliant female British scientist of the 20th century
Summary: 5 Stars
Probably the most meticulously researched biography I have ever read. Maddox`s accounts of the personalities, not only of Rosalind, but of all the famed scientists she came into contact with,are breatktaking. And Rosalind,herself,comes across as human and humane besides having a brilliant mind. Book Review: The true story behind a myth
Summary: 5 Stars
Rosalind Franklin is the closest that 20th century science has to a mythical figure. She had already died before the great majority of people had heard of her, but she sprang into prominence in James Watson's famous book The Double Helix. Watson's portrayal of her was not a kind one, and readers were left with the impression of a second-rank scientist, competent enough as an experimentalist, perhaps, but barely able to understand her own results and far too possessive to allow better scientists to analyse them and make their fortunes with them. It is important to emphasize to non-scientists that an unwillingness to hand over hard-won data to anyone who asks is almost a universal characteristic -- not at all a special fault of Franklin's. Watson's portrayal of himself and his friends was not particularly flattering in his book either, but the fact that he came over as a bit of a rogue himself only tended to reinforce his unattractive portrayal of Franklin.
It was obvious even when The Double Helix appeared that the "Rosy Franklin" described there was a crude caricature, and various people, most notably Anne Sayre, have tried over the years to rehabilitate her. Their efforts have resulted in a picture almost equally caricatural: a brilliant young scientist, subject to discrimination -- as a Jewish woman -- in the masculine Christian atmosphere of King's College, unable to to get the support she needed, cheated of her data by unscrupulous superiors and competitors, denied her rightful Nobel Prize. Brenda Maddox, in this excellent biography, points out that "In ensuing decades, the myth of the wronged heroine has grown, nourished by the fact of Rosalind's early death. Rosalind Franklin has become the symbol of woman's lowly position in the pantheon of science." Now that Chicago has a Rosalind Franklin University, and even King's College has a Franklin-Wilkins Building, there is little danger that she will be forgotten.
Maddox has interviewed nearly all of the major players -- with the obvious and unavoidable exception of Franklin herself -- and has written a balanced account of the story behind the myth. Certainly, Franklin was brilliant, and given time she might well have arrived at the structure of DNA herself, but there is nothing to suggest that she herself thought she had been cheated of the discovery, and she could not have received the Nobel Prize for it, because she had already died by the time it was awarded, and it is never awarded posthumously. Moreover, in the years after the discovery she enjoyed good relations with both Watson and Francis Crick, though not with her former superior at King's, Maurice Wilkins.