“[Rosalind Franklin] was the unacknowledged heroine of DNA, the Sylvia Plath of molecular biology.”—The Economist
In March 1953 Maurice Wilkins of King’s College London, announced the departure of his obstructive colleague, Rosalind Franklin to rival Cavendish Laboratory scientist, Francis Crick. But it was too late. Franklin’s unpublished data and crucial photograph of DNA had already been seen by her competitors at the Cambridge University lab. With the aid of these, plus their own knowledge, Watson and Crick discovered the structure of the molecule that genes are composed of—DNA. Five years later, Rosalind died of ovarian cancer. In 1962 Wilkins, Crick and Watson were awarded the Nobel Prize. Franklin’s part was forgotten until she was caricatured in Watson’s book The Double Helix.

In this full and balanced biography Maddox tells the powerful story of a remarkably single-minded, forthright and tempestuous young woman who was airbrushed out of the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century.