She hid her wounds and trouble made her withdrawn and upset. Her mother, Muriel, the very model of the traditional Jewish wife, wrote more than a decade after her second child’s death, “When Rosalind was upset she would figuratively curl up-like touching the fronds of a sea anemone. Overly sensitive, especially if she felt slighted or wronged, her response as a youngster was to retreat and ruminate.
Excerpts from “The Secret of Life,” Chapter 6Īs a little girl, Rosalind distinguished herself from her siblings (one older brother, David two younger brothers, Colin and Roland and a younger sister, Jenifer) by being quiet of voice, observant of those around her, and perceptive in her judgments.
#Rosalind franklin x ray diffraction on dna professional#
“Throughout her life, she had a difficult time tolerating the mediocrity of others, often at the expense of her professional development.”īelow, read more by Markel about one of the hidden figures who helped advance the study of life as we know it. “Like many gifted young people, Rosalind Franklin erroneously assumed that her intense intellectual focus and quick, logical mind were universal and common,” Markel writes. In two excerpts from his book, we learn about her early attraction to science and inability to suffer fools, as well as her time in France where she blossomed as a young researcher. Markel paints a vivid portrait of her as fiercely intelligent - and, occasionally, simply fierce (Markel recounts how she once got into a scuffle over a Tesla coil that did not belong to her). So who was Franklin? She displayed extraordinary intelligence, sensitivity and spirit from a young age, according to accounts. WATCH: Why discovery of DNA’s double helix was based on ‘rip-off’ of female scientist’s data But she was not credited and died at 37 before the record could be corrected. Franklin was a British chemist whose X-ray diffraction image of DNA was critical to Watson solving the double helix mystery. “If life was fair, which it’s not, it would be called the Watson-Crick-Franklin model,” Markel told the PBS NewsHour’s William Brangham in a conversation in September. In his new book, “ The Secret of Life: Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, Francis Crick, and the Discovery of DNA’s Double Helix,” Markel tells the far more complicated tale, and what he calls one of the most egregious rip-offs in the history of science. “This apocryphal moment, like so many others constituting the epic search for DNA’s structure, has long been exaggerated, altered, shaped, and embellished.” Howard Markel, director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan and PBS NewsHour columnist. We all know the scene - James Watson and Francis Crick, discoverers of the DNA double helix, walk into a pub in Cambridge and declare, “We have discovered the secret of life!” The rest is Nobel Prize history.Įxcept, “he most famous scientific announcement of the twentieth century was not made in precisely the way most of us were taught in high school,” writes Dr.
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