By Dennis D. McDonald

On completing the book, The Secret of Life: Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, Francis Crick, and the Discovery of DNA's Double Helix" by medical historian Howard Markel, I put down my Kindle and said to myself, “This author must have daughters.” And so, he does: the final paragraph of the (voluminous) Acknowledgements at the end of the book reads,

Throughout the writing of this book—particularly when describing the life and career of Rosalind Franklin—I thought a great deal about my two daughters, Samantha, age sixteen, and Bess, nearly twenty-one, Markel. I hope this volume inspires them to take bold, brave paths in their lives, no matter what obstacles they encounter on their way.

I could sense several times while reading the book a sense of the author’s rage, very controlled, at the manner in which Rosalind Franklin was treated, especially given the contribution her highly detailed x-ray crystallography data made to Watson and Crick’s final solving of the double helix structure of DNA, the key to DNA’s role in inheritance.

I have a daughter who has her own daughter (who is 5 as I write this). I could not help but think about them as I read the book and learned of Franklin’s travails. That Franklin died young and could not have been eligible for the Nobel Prize does not take away from the treatment she received while still living. Kudos to Markel for documenting the whole story in as much detail as he does.

What is especially troubling now is that my 5-year-old granddaughter, depending on where she lives in the United States, will actually have fewer rights growing up than her mother and grandmother had. We seem to be going backwards, not forward.

Copyright (c) 2023 by Dennis D. McDonald. The image at the top was made by Bing Image Creator, “powered by DALL-E,” in response to this prompt: “create an illustration of how science advances through shared information, using as a basic model the image of female scientists standing on the shoulders of female scientists."