The Gene: An Intimate History

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

What she was trying to drown, really, was noise. The chink of beer mugs in pubs infested by men; the casual bonhomie of men discussing science in their male-only common room at King’s. Franklin found most of her male colleagues “positively repulsive.” It was not just sexism—but the innuendo of sexism that was exhausting: the energy spent parsing perceived slights or deciphering unintended puns. She would rather work on other codes—of nature, of crystals, of invisible structures. Unusually for his time, Randall was not averse to hiring women scientists; there were several women working with Franklin at King’s. And female trailblazers had come before her: severe, passionate Marie Curie, with her chapped palms and char-black dresses, who had distilled radium out of a cauldron of black sludge and won not one Nobel Prize but two; and matronly, ethereal Dorothy Hodgkin at Oxford, who had won her own Nobel for solving the crystal structure of penicillin (an “affable looking housewife,” as one newspaper described her). Yet Franklin fit neither model: she was neither affable housewife nor cauldron-stirrer in a boiled wool robe, neither Madonna nor witch.