Biography
Sadly, few scientists take the time to chronicle their own experiences, so it is often left to others to piece them together. Here, I recommend four "biographies" (the quotes will become apparent in a minute), and as it happens, all of them are of women and written by women (just as the four recommended memoirs were by men). Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, by Brenda Maddox, patiently takes us through Franklin's careful crystallographic work on coal and her happy existence in Paris before repatriating to London with Randall's group to work on DNA; it then follows her highly productive post-DNA work with Aaron Klug on the structure of RNA viruses until her premature death. We are given the context to understand how Franklin came to work on the problem of DNA, the basis for the antipathy between her and Wilkins, her resiliency post-DNA, and her tenacity throughout isolation and disease. She likely died unaware of how critical the contribution of photograph 51, taken by her student Raymond Gosling, was to one of the 20th century's great discoveries. By the way, be on the lookout for a play entitled Photograph 51, by Anna Zeigler, which deftly covers this riveting story.
Photo of Rosalind Franklin: © Novartis Foundation
(SWW's Editor's Note: Dark Lady of DNA was a holiday present some years ago for our scientist daughter-in-law)
While Franklin famously eschewed model-building for hard facts, Barbara McClintock was the master of intuition. One of the most purposeful scientists of the 20th century, McClintock is captured in Evelyn Fox Keller's biography A Feeling for the Organism, published in 1983, coincidentally the year McClintock was awarded the Nobel Prize for her discovery of transposition. Though short, the book is not as easy a read as Maddox's biography of Franklin, in large part because of the difference in subject matter: we "get" the structure of DNA — it's iconic — but McClintock's work on maize's "controlling elements," which can change position in chromosomes, baffled her contemporaries. Her publications were (and still are) nearly impossible to read, so much so that by the 1950s she simply ceased to publish her work altogether. Yet this book, based in large part on interviews with McClintock and her colleagues, is captivating. I particularly enjoyed learning about McClintock's training and early career in the maize group at Cornell, when she made significant cytogenetic discoveries such as the crossing-over during meiosis that supported chromosomal exchange as the physical basis for genetic recombination.
When I was a girl, there was no more prominent example of a female scientist than Marie Curie — this may still be the case. Unlike Franklin or McClintock, Curie coupled her extraordinary scientific life with a husband and children. In Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout, Lauren Redniss dazzles us with her departure from the typical biography: here imaginative presentation replaces the typical dreary march of chronology. This is a magical book, with luminous cyanotype artwork and even a typeface newly created by Redniss. Chapter titles have double meanings — e.g. "Magnetism" for the chapter when she meets her husband Pierre, as they both worked on magnetic properties at the time, and "Exposure" for the chapter on her revealed love affair with Paul Langevin, Pierre's student, following Pierre's death. Clearly written, the book succinctly follows the path through fin-de-siècle physics, but often interleaves scrapbook-like references to future implications of the Curies' discoveries (for example, Chernobyl and Hiroshima) as well as odes to Poland and poignant excerpts from Marie's diaries and letters.
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