Rosalind Franklin and DNA

Dear ReadersI really like this book for a number of reasons. But it is a story that makes me feel quite sorry and kind of sad or disappointed. I believe the facts as reported in the book are fairly accurate and that's not really the problem of course but what concerns me most is the nature of the tragedy this story describes . The disappointment here is that we didn't know the facts earlier.And there's no way to go back and right the wrong or "fix the thing". I am probably a hopeless romantic. But that is how I feel about this case. This person Rosalind Franklin was as described in this book as someone who I would have liked to have known. I used to often chat with a female crystallographer when I was in undergraduate physics and quite often I shared with her my observations about people in physics and she often shared with me what it was like for her working as a Post Doc in crystallography.She later moved away and some years after that I read the "Double Helix"...I don't think I finished it at that time but I do remember "Rosalind" as she was portrayed in that book and I compared that portrayal to my friend who had been doing crystallography and I wondered what was going on. That was about 1977 or thereabouts. And I didn't really care about the whole affair or DNA at the time until much later when I was actually thrown into Biophysics quite by accident.And then my own research in DNA took off. And as I began to learn more about DNA I began to take note of all the many different books which had been coming out talking about the discovery and talking about Rosalind Franklin. Actually alot of the discoveries of these various books was done browsing Amazon.com. I began to get curious about what was going on or what had been going on with regard to the discovery of the structure of DNA. What was the difference between these "official versions" (Watson et al.) and now these "unofficial versions" of the story.I wish that the circumstances had been different for Rosalind. We lost a beautiful person and a great crystallographer.....and I wish she could have had the recognition that she was certainly worthy of. (actually we've lost many great minds in science to cancer.....doesn't that strike you as odd?)The way to resolve the apparent contadiction between this book and say Watson's accounts is to simply realize that the DNA work was under strict government control.There was no "intellectual freedom" that Watson and his guys would like us to believe. Government control is not talked about in Anne Sayre's book. She is trying to look at it in a different way....that there are "rules of conduct" in science and that there is/should be some kind of honor system...I agree with her but that didn't apply to this DNA story....it was a government "setup" from the beginning.sjwp.s. as reported in the book her list of citations for X-ray work in viruses inter alia is quite exceptional

Sayre's book is a biography with an agenda. It is also one of the rare instances where an author is sufficiently thoughtful and objective to keep the agenda from ruining the piece.Rosalind Franklin was a chemist doing x-ray crystallography on DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) in Maurice Wilkins' laboratory at King's College, London. Concurrently, James Watson and Francis Crick were trying to puzzle out DNA's molecular structure in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. Technically the two institutions were not competitors, because the English scientific establishment had "ceded" the DNA problem to King's. The world knows that Watson and Crick were first to publish the correct structure of the substance which encodes and controls every detail of the configuration, development, maintenance and reproduction of living things.Watson and Crick were the kind of bad boys we generally admire. From positions very low on the Cavendish totem pole, they tunneled under, around and through the decorous conventions of incremental science to snatch a Nobel-caliber breakthrough from the very hands of the people who were supposed (eventually) to produce it. They even had a plausible excuse for ethical shortcuts, because the American superstar-chemist Linus Pauling, unconstrained by British decorum, was known to be working on the DNA structure.In 1968, Watson published "The Double Helix", an entertaining and irreverent personal account of the triumph he and Crick had achieved in 1953. On the positive side, the book gave many people (including myself) their first look at the fascinating scientific and human details of a brilliant achievement in the relatively new field of molecular biology. On the negative side, Watson's version of the story did not please everyone who had prior knowledge of the people and events involved. Among the least pleased, to put it mildly, were the family and friends of Rosalind Franklin (Ms. Franklin herself did not live to see the cruelly caricatured "Rosy" that Watson sketched for his largely naive and trusting audience.)One of the friends, Anne Sayre, took on the task of providing a comprehensive portrait of Franklin, interwoven with a retelling of the DNA story centered on the tragic consequences flowing from the simple inability of two intelligent people (Franklin and Wilkins) to get along. But the book is much more than a psychological study. Sayre documents some unambiguous facts that establish what Franklin knew about DNA and when she knew it. Also revealed are the instances in which her work was used without her knowledge and, even more unfortunately, the degree to which misunderstanding of Franklin's conclusions about the B-form of DNA slowed everyone's progress and robbed her of due credit.I found Sayre to be unfailingly perceptive and balanced while following a course of strong, even indignant, advocacy. This is no mean feat, and follows in part from her extensive interviews with all the principals, as well as fruitful discussions with her scientist husband. I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in gaining perspective on the DNA story, and on science itself.

OK, so it's probably a little biased because it's clear that the author was close friends with Ms Franklin, but nonetheless, it painted a very interesting picture of the woman who made many contributions to the scientific field, and who alas, received very little recognition for her work. Certainly James Watson who wrote [The Double Helix] appeared to discredit Ms Franklin almost every time he mentions her, even going so far as giving her a diminutive nickname of 'Rosy'.This book attempts to not just describe Rosalind's drive in challenging herself and others around her, but delves also into her impressive family history, and through that, we start to see how Rosalind's character was shaped. Her confidence and penchant for discussions, even her enjoyment of dissenting opinions, was sometimes perceived by other less confident individuals as arrogance. She unfortunately, lived in a time when women were merely tolerated but hardly respected in her chosen fields in England. It was only during her years in Paris that she appeared to be at her happiest, where the environment of enthusiastic discussions and information sharing was, for her, simply ideal.If her environment at King's College had been similar to what she experienced in Paris, it is thought she may have broken the DNA code much sooner. Instead, apart from a student, she worked in isolation. If not for the copious and detailed notes she took and which survived her, we would not have known how far she had come in her DNA research.Once Crick and Watson had published their paper on DNA, Rosalind, not only wasn't bitter, but she wrote a supporting paper that displayed her delight in the beauty and perfection of the model.

Excellent book and helps right a wrong done to this woman. Worth a read before seeing Photograph51