A cinematic account of toxic masculinity among 1950s DNA researchers – and a celebration of scientist Rosalind Franklin
The first page of Howard Markel’s comprehensive history The Secret of Life reads like the opening scene of a movie. “On February 28, 1953, shortly after the chapel bells struck noon, two men hurtled down a stairwell of Cambridge University’s Cavendish Physics Laboratory. Bursting with exhilaration, they had just made the scientific discovery of a lifetime … ” Delving into the human lives and relationships behind “the race to unravel DNA’s structure”, the book frequently zooms in on such visual details, from the “crusty yellow remains” of fried egg at Francis Crick’s breakfast table to the “clickety clack” of Rosalind Franklin’s heels echoing “on the slick, wet marble floor” of King’s College London.
A movie needs a hero and a villain, and in this story they are Franklin – brilliant, female, Jewish, misunderstood – and James Watson, whose “mean-spirited” 1968 memoir “commandeered the historical record with boundless guile and cunning”. This is the story of how Watson and Crick were memorialised for their work and Franklin’s contribution was minimised, complete with accounts of the academic politics, really quite personal character sketches (“Watson was a razor-thin, shy, odd-looking, and unathletic boy with bulging eyes and peculiar facial mannerisms”) and admirably clear explanations of the science: X-ray crystallography, molecular biology, mathematics and more.