Book Review

Commemorating the Double Helix

Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA

N Engl J Med 2003; 348:1729-1730April 24, 2003

Article

Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA
By Brenda Maddox. 380 pp., illustrated. New York, HarperCollins, 2002. $29.95. ISBN: 0-06-018407-8

This biography illuminates one of the most mysterious protagonists in a fascinating story of fibers, photographs, and feelings, in which biology is revolutionized with the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Rosalind Franklin, Maddox's “dark lady of DNA,” comes out of the shadows in a captivating three-part biography that chronicles a London childhood, studies at Cambridge University, mountaineering, and research in Paris; the discovery of the double helix; and success as a research team leader and international scientific acclaim, brought to an untimely end in 1958 by her death from ovarian cancer.

The nub of this tale is well known. Franklin worked for Maurice Wilkins, a competitor, at King's College London. She obtained some of the finest x-ray–diffraction photographs from DNA fibers that have ever been recorded. These photographs, coupled with an understanding of x-ray diffraction and the chemistry of the four DNA bases (A, T, G, and C), held the key to the double helix. Without Franklin's knowledge, Wilkins showed her photographs to James Watson and Francis Crick. Franklin and Wilkins, who were equally equipped to have made the same discovery, independently published their own results alongside the Watson–Crick article describing the double helix, which revealed how DNA stores genetic information and passes it on to successive generations. (Crick, Watson, and Wilkins went on to share the Nobel prize in 1962. The Nobel Committee limits the number of winners to three and does not give posthumous awards.)

It was not until publication of Watson's controversial book The Double Helix some 10 years after Franklin's tragic death at 37 years of age that the story became widely known. As Maddox describes it in an epilogue, entitled “Life after Death,” what started as an embarrassment for Nathan Pusey, then president of Harvard University (whose press decided not to publish Watson's account, which went on to become a bestseller), served as a wake-up call for those who knew and respected Franklin's contributions to the discovery of the double helix. Today, on the 50th anniversary of this discovery, it is generally accepted that her now-famous x-ray–diffraction photograph number 51 played a critical part in the Watson–Crick discovery.

Those who are familiar with the Nobel-prize trio and other dramatis personae, such as John Bernal, William Cochran, Carolyn Cohen, Isidore Fankuchen, John Finch, David Harker, Kenneth Holmes, Aaron Klug, Anthony North, Linus Pauling, Max Pertuz, John Randall, Anne and David Sayre, and Vladimir Vand, will not be able to put down parts two and three of Maddox's biography. The most interesting aspect of the story, however, is her account of Franklin's earlier years.

Franklin was born in 1920 into an upper-middle-class banking family, which “stood high in Anglo-Jewry” — part of the establishment to be sure, yet never fully English. She developed as an outsider. Early on, she declared herself a scientist (and, by implication, not a banker). Having been referred to as “alarmingly clever,” she went up to Cambridge in 1938, where she found an institution that first admitted women in 1869 but would not grant them the degree of B.A. Two years after she received her Ph.D. in 1946 for internationally recognized research on coal, Franklin's undergraduate degree was awarded retroactively.

Franklin's happiest times both professionally and personally were spent on the Continent. Her first research post took her to Paris, where she worked productively in the somewhat bohemian laboratory of Jacques Mering on the Left Bank, studying coal with x-rays. Socially, she became “unEnglished” (as D.H. Lawrence would say), feeling more at home in Paris than London. Franklin hiked and climbed extensively in the Alps, pursuing a passion that she had first indulged in Norway. Returning to the gloom and rationing of postwar London in 1950, she was once again thrown into a male-dominated scientific enclave for which she had no sympathy and little respect. Her professional relationship with Wilkins broke down immediately. The light at the end of the tunnel proved to be leadership of her own research team at Birkbeck College, where she shone x-rays on the other genetic material, RNA, realizing some of her enormous scientific potential.

Maddox's biography sensitively chronicles Franklin's short, often unhappy life, putting the double-helix story into a rich, understandable human context. Far from being a tragic figure, Franklin emerges as a cultured scientist who was committed to excellence. As a structural biologist, I wish I had met Rosalind Franklin.

Stephen K. Burley, M.D., D.Phil.
Structural GenomiX, San Diego, CA 92121
sburley@stromix.com