Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox. Harper Collins, £20, pp 400. ISBN 0 00257149 8. Rating: ★★★
Rosalind Franklin, the biophysicist whose work provided the scientific support for Watson and Crick's development of the structure of DNA, has remained a mystery, her opinions and motivations hidden. Was she—as described by her colleague Maurice Wilkins, who shared the Nobel prize with Watson and Crick—the “dark lady,” a bellicose spinster who could not collaborate and resented their work and originality? Was her work ignored because it was insignificant or because she was antisocial? Or was she a brilliant scientist and feminist, a sacrificial victim, her work overlooked and her progress diminished because she was an outsider who didn't fit into the “old boy” network? The truth, of course, lies somewhere in between. 
Franklin was the eldest daughter of a wealthy, upper middle class, established British Jewish family, which owned banks and a publishing company. Believing that her parents thought her less important than her three brothers, she none the less excelled at school and at Cambridge University. A brilliant physicist, she worked for the British government, doing original and important work on the nature of different coals, using x ray crystallographic techniques.
After the second world war, she spent several years in Paris directing research using x rays to study coal and other solids. Gaining a strong scientific reputation, she was invited to King's College in London to work with Maurice Wilkins to use the new techniques of x ray crystallography to define large biological molecules such as the RNA of the tobacco mosaic virus and DNA. Her painstaking and precise work created several images of DNA that proved that it had a helical structure. While the “race” was on to develop a model of DNA before anyone else, Watson and Crick needed the structural data that her x ray images and research could provide, and “borrowed” her results. Not receiving credit or acknowledgment for her contributions, she continued to work on the structure of RNA viruses, establishing important insights until her death from ovarian cancer aged 37. Four years later Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the Nobel prize, failing to acknowledge her contributions.
This biography describes the world of the burgeoning biological research fields of the late 1940s and 1950s—the collegiality, the conferences, the networks of friends, lovers, mentors and students, the competitiveness, and the search for funding that all made up the world of science and that are all reminiscent of research today.
Undoubtedly an excellent and productive researcher, producing 5 to 10 papers a year, Franklin could be uncompromising and demanding, but no more demanding of others than she was of herself. She had no personal need for academic titles or positions, but instead just looked for funding for her research. She was happy and secure in Paris, but after returning to English science, she found herself misunderstood, alienated, separated, and ignored.
Brenda Maddox painstakingly steers a course to show a woman who was passionate in her work, accomplished in her science, who had close friends, students, and mentors, and yet whose personal motivations and desires remain unclear. But how can her personal strengths or weaknesses have occasioned her lack of recognition? Must one be a good team player to be a good scientist? How can she be vilified for being a private, yet uncompromising and demanding person, when her colleagues and mentors were as individualistic as she was? Would she too have won the Nobel prize had she lived? We will never know, but after reading this book, Rosalind Franklin becomes a complete woman and scientist, a role model, and a laudable mentor, no longer a shadowy, embittered spinster or ennobled martyr.