Genes, Girls and Gall.(Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA)

In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick stormed into The Eagle pub outside their Cambridge University lab and declared that they had discovered the secret of life. After two years of frenetic brainstorming and failed attempts, the pair had unraveled the structure of DNA--one of the century's most thrilling scientific discoveries. Its pioneers were honored with Nobel Prizes all round--except, arguably, for one. In a fast-paced new book, "Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA," Brenda Maddox has restored to history the author of some of the most significant research into genetics. Franklin, then a biophysicist at King's College in London, was herself working on the structure of DNA and, argues Maddox, was on the cusp of unraveling it when Watson secretly obtained some of her data and raced across the finish line. Maddox's fresh, wide-ranging account plots the process of the discovery, which was fraught with more duplicity and backstabbing than a Sherlock Holmes mystery.

In his bumptious best-selling tract "The Double Helix," Watson had demonized Franklin as a volatile, antagonistic bluestocking. Later accounts hailed her as a feminist icon, robbed of the Nobel by male colleagues. Access to Franklin's previously unpublished personal papers and lab notes enabled Maddox to move away from these caricatures, drawing out Franklin's difficult and complex position. She found her lab at King's College an extraordinarily hostile environment, in which women were treated as second-class citizens, and she struggled to have her work taken seriously. A wealthy, educated Jew, she never felt entirely at home in drab, postwar Britain. Yet in friendlier labs she prospered. Pursuing groundbreaking research on viruses at Birkbeck College in London after leaving King's, she was liked, admired and successful.

Watson certainly found her work to be of use. In the winter of 1952, running out of new ideas on the structure of DNA and anxious about reports from across the Atlantic that renowned chemist Linus Pauling was close to a solution, Watson paid a visit to Maurice Wilkins, Franklin's boss at King's. Wilkins showed him one of her startlingly clear X-ray photographs. It was a crucial piece of evidence. "The instant I saw the picture my mouth ...