The title is the term given by the biographer Brenda Maddox to the tragic life of Rosalind Franklin. Perhaps tragic isn’t the right word, but I believe it fits considering the story. Our unit on women and science showed the constant imbalance in work ability and credit between men and women due to sexism. Franklin’s work was no stranger to this series of setbacks due to her gender. Heck, she would likely have won the Nobel Prize had her work not been overshadowed by her male peers. Sadly, her groundbreaking discovery on DNA was little-known and as a result her male coworkers ended up receiving the Nobel.
Franklin was born in London on July 25, 1920. She was from a wealthy banking Jewish family who placed emphasis on education, which Franklin adhered to. She was a hard worker but also loved to travel and hike. She loved the outdoors as much as she enjoyed her research and education. Her friends and colleagues considered her to be incredibly gifted with a kind heart. Some of her later coresearchers on DNA would disagree and call her short-tempered and stubborn. She was later accepted into Newnham Women’s College at Cambridge University, where she studied physics and chemistry. After she graduated, she worked for the British Coal Utilization Research Association on the porosity of coal for her PhD thesis, after which she travelled as a guest speaker. In 1946, she moved to Paris. She learned X-ray crystallography for her main job, and later moved to London to work at Kings College.
It was here at King’s college that Franklin would work with James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins on DNA with X-ray crystallography to show the structure of DNA. Watson and Crick modelled DNA using the pictures taken by Franklin, but Wilkins and Franklin did not work well together. Their personalities clashed and slowed their progress, leading them to work in separation mostly. This led to Wilkins finding Crick and Watson with their models of DNA off Franklin’s photos, including the famous photo 51. Captured in 1952, Franklin had taken a beautiful x-ray photo of DNA from a human calf’s tissue. It showed the double helix build structure of the DNA in the clearest photo of its time. When Wilkins saw the photo from Crick and Watson, Franklin had not published her results, thus leading to her not being credited for her contribution for their model.