Franklin was miserable at King's, and stayed for just 27 months before moving on to a more collegial lab. He seemed to think she was there to do X-ray crystallography as his assistant, not his equal she seemed to think he was incapable of accepting a woman as an intellectual peer. If Wilkins could have had his way, at least according to the newest version of the story laid out in Brenda Maddox's ''Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA,'' he would have rendered Franklin dark to the point of oblivion. And all but airbrushed out of the picture is Wilkins's colleague Rosalind Franklin, whom Wilkins took to calling ''our dark lady.''ĭark, indeed. Hovering in the background is the shadowy Maurice Wilkins, half rival, half collaborator, who works in his own cramped room at King's College, London, taking X-rays of the crystal form of DNA to deduce its shape. The action takes place in England, in the men's cramped, shared office at Cambridge University and at the nearby Eagle Pub, where, fortified with ale, they seem to do their best thinking. because he can't quite settle down to a single field of study. In the story of the discovery of the structure of DNA, James Watson stars as the American whiz kid besotted with pretty girls and with making a name for himself his British co-star, Francis Crick, is a bit older, a bit more refined, but still a renegade who can't quite earn a Ph.D.
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