Rosalind Franklin: the dark lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox, HarperCollins, £20, ISBN 0002571498
HER scientific output was prodigious. Her crystallographic work at King’s College London was a crucial contribution to the double-helix model of DNA discovered by James Watson and Francis Crick. But in his bestselling The Double Helix, Watson portrayed Rosalind Franklin as a mean-spirited and priggish blight on the new biophysics group at King’s. Franklin had died of cancer long before the book was published, and her friends and feminists mounted a riposte that presented her as a secular saint: a scientific genius, a kind and generous woman tough only in response to…
