Director's Cut

It’s the story of the race to find out DNA’s structure against the background of the dramatis personae and the scientific institutions involved—King’s College, London, and Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, where the fundamental research was done. By the mid 1930s, it had been established that genes were physical entities; by the early 1950s, it was known that the chemical material of the gene was DNA. Watson and Crick, along with Wilkins, and greatly assisted by Franklin’s X-ray diffraction photographs, proposed a model for the DNA molecule in the form of a double helix, with two distinct chains wound round one another about a common axis. They also suggested that to replicate DNA the cell unwinds the two chains and uses each as a template to guide the formation of a new companion chain—thus producing two double helices, each with one new and one old chain. The bare facts of how this research was done was as follows.

In 1951, Franklin, based on her work on X-ray diffraction of coal and other carbon forms, was invited to join the lab at Kings by the director, J.T. Randall. She was to work on the DNA structure, a project that was also being pursued by Maurice Wilkins, though neither was informed of the other’s project. At the same time, Watson arrived at Cavendish as a post-graduate fellow where, along with Crick, he soon got to work on building models of the DNA structure based on data provided by others. Meanwhile, Franklin was producing superb X-ray diffraction pictures of two forms of DNA, one of which was helical, the other not.

Franklin’s research data that reached Watson and Crick "by a circuitous route and without her consent had been crucial to their discovery. Watson’s glimpse of one of her X-ray photographs of DNA gave him the final push to the summit." Maddox says that from the evidence of Rosalind’s notebooks it is clear that "she would have got there by herself before long".

This raises the much broader question of how scientific academic research is carried out. Thomas Kuhn, in his classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, says that "normal science, the puzzle-solving activity, is a highly cumulative enterprise." In other words, it is a team effort and all members owe their allegiance to the director, who has the intellectual property rights over the fruits of the research, irrespective of his contribution to the project. This ownership means that the director can dispose of the results in any manner he or she feels fit.

From Maddox’s wide-ranging conversations with Franklin’s colleagues, one fact that emerges is that she was "a difficult woman". This prickliness may be one of the factors why the men ditched her.

So, what is the verdict? Male conspiracy to keep "that woman" out or a martyr to a feudal system? Probably both, though the mcp attitudes are clearly visible through the labyrinths of scientific research.

(Brenda Maddox’s Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, HarperCollins, Special Indian Price, £4.99)