Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA
Brenda Maddox
The untold story of the woman who helped to make one of humanity's greatest discoveries - DNA - but who was never given credit for doing so. Our dark lady is leaving us next week; on 7 March 1953 Maurice Wilkins of King's College, London, wrote to Francis Crick at the Cavendish laboratories in Cambridge to say that as soon as his obstructive female colleague was gone from King's, he, Crick, and James Watson, a young American working with Crick, could go full speed ahead with solving the structure of the DNA molecule that lies in every gene. Not long after, the pair whose names will be forever linked announced to the world that they had discovered the secret of life.
Award History
1 wins · 2 total
| Award | Year | Result | Category / Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and TechnologyMajor | 2002 | Winner | Secondary source |
| Costa Book Awards: Biography | 2002 | Finalist | Secondary source |
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies
This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.
01 Central figures
- Rosalind Franklin99%
Show lower-confidence suggestions
These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.
- Maurice Wilkins48%
- Francis Crick42%
02 Central places
None extracted with sufficient confidence.
03 Suggested argument
No argument inferred with sufficient confidence.
04 Reading orientation
35 / 100 academicSerious trade
An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.
Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 66%.