July 29, 2024
Journalist Mills debuts with an insightful look at the personal and professional struggles of Dr. Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958), whose contributions to the study of DNA went uncelebrated during her lifetime. In 1951, Rosalind works as a researcher at King’s College, London, studying the makeup of DNA. Using X-ray technology, she discovers and takes photographs of DNA’s double helix structure, but Dr. Maurice Wilkins, a fellow researcher, takes the credit. Refusing to be discouraged, Rosalind takes another research position in a lab at the University of London, where she’s denied a pay raise because she is not a man with a family to support. Yet Rosalind refuses to succumb to the pressure to marry and give up her work. Her resilience is again tested by severe abdominal pain and a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, which results in a hysterectomy. Mills dramatizes Rosalind’s scientific prowess in intricate details and delivers insightful character work, exploring how Rosalind’s dedication to her research led to her solitary life. It’s a worthy companion to Marie Benedict’s Her Hidden Genius.
September 1, 2024
Rosalind Franklin, biochemist and researcher, is a heroine and tragic figure to many. This fictionalized account of her life depicts the massive discrimination that she dealt with in the educational institutions and laboratories of post-WWII Europe. Her Cambridge PhD was conferred, though that outcome was not certain despite her years of exceptional work. Her grants often had caveats attached that left her and her work in the shadows while her male counterparts got the limelight. The narrative is interspersed with accounts of her younger days enduring the Blitz and the privations of war, giving a sense of the conditions that formed her character. It was Franklin's work in micro-X-ray photography that led the way to the discovery of the double-helix shape of DNA, earning a Nobel Prize for the men who drew from it. She died of cancer at just 37 years old. The tone of this historical novel is somber, as befits Franklin's situation. It is readable, informative, and relatively accurate despite being fictionalized and will be enjoyed by readers who seek the deeper truth behind history's victors.
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