A Women's-History-Month Read: Her Hidden Genius (Book Review)

by Janie
 

Her Hidden Genius: A Novel

By Marie Benedict

 

Figure 1. American book cover. Source. (Side note: what a great book cover, in­cor­porating both a sty­lized double helix and x-ray!). Fron­tis­piece: Photo 51. Source.

March is Women's History Month. So, it was per­fect timing to read a new his­tor­ical fic­tion book on the life and work of a pre­emi­nent woman in sci­en­tific his­tory, Rosalind Franklin. In Her Hidden Genius, author Marie Benedict sculpts a snap­shot ren­der­ing of Rosalind Franklin from 1947 to 1958 using known his­tor­ical facts as an arma­ture. It's writ­ten in the first-person as though nar­rated by Franklin her­self.
 

The book opens with post­graduate phy­sical chem­ist Franklin ar­riv­ing in Paris in 1947 to join a new lab, where she learns and mas­ters x-ray crys­tallo­graphy tech­niques. There, she is happy within a sci­entific mil­ieu that is a far friend­lier, far more egali­tarian cry from that of her for­mer London sur­round­ings. The novel follows her sub­se­quent return to England, to King's College London, where she has been re­cruited to apply her x-ray dif­frac­tion exper­tise to DNA rather than to coal and carbons – and so her work takes on a bio­log­ical twist. It is here where she and her research assis­tant Raymond Gosling first dis­cover DNA's A and B forms (hy­drated DNA adopts the A-form while dehy­drated DNA takes on the B-form), deduce that phos­phates lie on the edges of the DNA mole­cule, and first sug­gest DNA's helical struc­ture. The mom­ent at which she beholds their stun­ning photo­graph of B-form DNA – none other than Photo 51 – is wonder­fully depic­ted.
 

Through­out the book, we are also privy to Franklin's ten­sion with mem­bers of her family that disap­prove of her career path. We wit­ness the escala­tion of the infam­ous fric­tion with her col­league Maurice Wilkins, who, in his bitter­ness over feeling that his posi­tion in the lab was usurped, slips her early find­ings to Francis Crick and James Watson over at the Cavendish. What ensues is a tense race to dis­cover and pub­licly an­nounce the struc­ture of DNA: the mis­guided Linus Pauling at Caltech ver­sus Rosalind Franklin and Ray Gosling at King's College London ver­sus Crick and Watson at the Cavendish (and col­luding Wilkins, plus Linus Pauling's son, whom they roped into their team). The book con­veys Franklin's deep unhap­piness dur­ing these years back in England, the cherry on top being, of course, her dis­covery that Watson and Crick are pub­lishing work that appro­priates her own find­ings. In spite of this, the nar­rative fol­lows Franklin as she moves for­ward and builds her own res­earch group work­ing on viral RNA at Birkbeck College. And then there is her ter­minal cancer diag­nosis – a tragic ending in which a scien­tific legacy premat­urely out­lives the person.
 

Figure 2. Rosalind Franklin. Source.

Overall, Benedict paints a por­trait of an upstan­ding, head­strong, and bril­liant mind who lives by a commit­ment to exact­itude and rig­orous evi­dence, and who suc­ceeds in her search for scien­tific truths at a time when sci­ence truly was a sea of boys' clubs. She navi­gates miso­gyny in forms both bla­tant and subtly (often-uninten­tionally) insid­ious, at all levels from co­workers' jibes to lab heads' off­hand com­ments to well-intending family mem­bers' advice to assumed soc­ietal under­currents. Some of it still hits home. Women read­ers, regard­less of whether they have spent time in sci­ence or not, will likely see echoes of still-current reali­ties within the por­trayals of sub­dued slights and subtle word choices.
 

I was pleas­antly sur­prised to find that the dia­logue in the book didn't skimp as much on details about the actual sci­ence as a histor­ical fiction novel with broad ap­peal might. It's still gen­eral enough that even I – with next to no know­ledge about crystal­lography – can follow. The dia­logue bet­ween Franklin and Ray Gosling in parti­cular con­veys the logic behind the steps they took to reach their ground­breaking discov­eries, which I found fascin­ating and tel­ling of just how detail-oriented Franklin was.
 

The book por­trays her bril­liance in science wonder­fully, but I did wonder about one aspect of her depic­tion. Real-life Franklin iden­tified as cul­turally Jewish but was not reli­gious, ins­tead embra­cing human­ism. (She was quoted as having said, "I main­tain that faith in this world is per­fectly pos­sible with­out faith in another world.") But the Franklin in Her Hidden Genius is touchy to an odd ex­treme, carp­ing at any and all reli­gious refer­ences that other charac­ters men­tion. Those include meta­phors like "x is the Holy Grail of y" that have become so inte­grated into the English lan­guage that their reli­gious con­nota­tions have been all but lost in ordin­ary usage: "Birkbeck [is] a little like hea­ven on earth. If I bel­ieved in all that"; or, "You're like a guar­dian angel... Even though I don't bel­ieve in angels, of course." Admit­tedly, I found that character-Franklin's freq­uent need to insert her irreli­gious­ness into conver­sations grew irrit­ating, even as some­one who is also areli­gious. Just a minor snag that dis­tracted me as I tried to read.
 

In the Author's Note at the end of the book, Benedict writes that the depic­tion of Franklin is based off Anne Sayre's 1975 book, Rosalind Franklin and DNA, which Franklin's friend wrote and pub­lished as an angry res­ponse to Watson's 1968 book The Double Helix, in which he denig­rates and de­fames Rosalind Franklin. To be fair, I haven't read either.
 

Her Hidden Genius is a fine addi­tion to Benedict's oeuvre of hist­orical fiction novels about women who were missed by the lime­light of his­tory. It's a well-researched and three-dimen­sional tribute to a remar­kable scien­tist.