A review by ahsenusta
Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox

5.0

Anyone who has read James Watson’s ‘The Double Helix’ where Rosalind Franklin is completely misrepresented as an incompetent, emotional woman in a man’s world joining the DNA discovery bandwagon must read this much more accurate and inspiring biography. Rosalind’s life, character, and contributions to science deserve to be recognised and celebrated. She was a woman of strength and intelligence who contributed 37 scientific publications in her brief 37 years on Earth. The most astonishing fact I retrieved from this book among many others is probably the unashamed way in which Wilkins (her boss and colleague) went behind her back and shared her unpublished data with Watson and Crick which led to their finding of the DNA model. While Wilkins made the undeserving profit of sharing the Nobel prize with the Cambridge pair, Rosalind got the lousy gift of sharing the name of one of King’s College London’s institutional buildings together with the man she despised most. The Franklin-Wilkins building in KCL’s Waterloo campus will forever be a bitter reminder of the misogynistic attitude of male scientists in the 20th century and how they were allowed to get away with it, and most of its students will remain unaware of the irony unless of course they read this eye-opening book.