Rosalind Franklin (49 page)

Copyright

First published in the United Kingdom in 2002 by HarperCollins Publishers.

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2002 by HarperCollins Publishers.

ROSALIND FRANKLIN
. Copyright © 2002 by Brenda Maddox. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

First Perennial edition published 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 0-06-098508-9

Epub Edition © MARCH 2013 ISBN 9780062283504

03   04   05   06   07  
RRD
   10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

 

 

¹
Rosalind's sister, Jenifer Franklin Glynn, and her brothers, Colin and Roland Franklin, strongly disagree with Anne Sayre's interpretation of Rosalind's relationship with Mering and do not believe that Rosalind had the romantic feelings Sayre attributes to her.

 

 

²
This diminutive is not as inherently insulting as many critics of Watson's ‘Rosy' in
The Double Helix
have suggested. When I first arrived in England from Massachusetts, I shared a flat with an Anglo-Irish Reuters journalist named Rosanna Groarke, and routinely addressed her, although no one else did, as ‘Rosie'. It seemed a sign of American friendliness.

 

 

³
Watson has often used this story against Rosalind, claiming for instance in his Harvard lecture of 30 September 1999, that she was stung by Hodgkin's comment which she took as a rebuke for her ignorance of crystallography. But Jack Dunitz who was present, says that Watson's retelling of Rosalind's reaction is exaggerated and that she accepted the correction of such a respected senior scientist with good humour.

 

 

⁴
Her article, as published in
Nature
on 26 February 1955, began: ‘Tobacco mosaic virus is a rod-shaped virus, of (most frequent) length 3000 A, diameter 150 A and molecular weight 50 million.' The parenthesis may have been added in response to Pirie's criticism.

 

 

⁵
The answer is ENT — on the basis that ‘O' stands for one, ‘TT' for two and three, ‘FF' for four and five, etc.

 

 

⁶
The Franklin family disagree once more with Anne Sayre's account.

 

 

⁷
In 2001 Colin Franklin and Jenifer Franklin Glynn gave the capital, by then about £150,000, to Newnham College for its bursary fund.