by Jenifer Glynn, Oxford University Press, ÂŁ14.99/$27.95
MARIE CURIE is an unspoken presence in this touching but unsentimental memoir in which historian Jenifer Glynn tells the story of her older sister, physical chemist and molecular biologist Rosalind Franklin. Both Curie and Franklin enjoyed great family support and were drawn to French culture. Neither wanted to be held up as an example of a successful female scientist. Most significantly of all, perhaps, neither cared for the conventional rewards of science.
The controversy over Franklin’s credit for her contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA has inspired many books, but Glynn offers fresh insight into her sister’s much-discussed life with family letters. In one, Franklin, newly arrived in Paris as a postgraduate researcher during a post-war, rationed winter, writes to her worried parents in London: “My living conditions are extremely primitive compared with home – though they might well be worse. I wash in a little tin bowl, the only water being from one cold tap in the kitchen at the other end of the flat… I have practically no heating… but I would willingly go more primitive if it were necessary to preserve my freedom.” This invites comparison with Curie’s reflections on her own Paris student accommodation in her autobiography: “This life, painful from certain points of view, had for all that, a real charm for me. It gave me a very precious sense of liberty and independence.”
Advertisement
Unlike Curie, however, Franklin’s love of independence made her essentially a lone worker. Although she made a few close friends and relished debating scientific ideas with equals – not least her friend Francis Crick – she was never able to form the kind of argumentative collaboration that was so fruitful for Crick and James Watson. “Rosalind’s hates, as well as her friendships, tended to be enduring,” her mother admitted. “She was prickly,” Glynn writes.
Franklin fell out miserably with her research supervisor Ronald Norrish when she was at the University of Cambridge, and her later clash with King’s College London colleague Maurice Wilkins almost certainly deprived her of her rightful share of the credit for decoding the structure of DNA.
The science in this story gets its due with the help of Franklin’s later colleague, chemist and biophysicist Aaron Klug, and physiologist Ian Glynn (the author’s husband). But it is the lively, atmospheric, personal details, uniquely known to Franklin’s family, that make this book more substantial than its brevity would suggest.