Rosalind Franklin is unfortunately probably best known for not achieving the recognition she should have got in life for unravelling the secrets of DNA. Most crucially, using X-ray techniques that may have contributed significantly to her later death from cancer at the tragically young age of 37, she had taken beautiful photographs of the patterns of DNA. She established its existence in two forms and she worked out the position of the phosphorous atoms in its backbone. But could Crick and Watson have done it without the dark lady? In two years at King’s, Rosalind Franklin had made major contributions to the understanding of DNA. Not long after, the pair announced to the world that they had discovered the secret of life. For that reason, science autobiographies can provide valuable input (case material) for teaching philosophy and history of science to science students.Our dark lady is leaving us next week on the 7th of 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. Thus, I will explain how science autobiographies on the one hand and genres of the imagination (such as novels and movies) on the other may deepen our comprehension of tensions and dilemmas of life sciences research then and now. the ‘militarisation’ of research and the relationship between beauty and destruction). I will focus my comparative analysis on issues still relevant today, such as dual use, the handling of sensitive scientific information (in a moral setting defined by the tension between collaboration and competition) and, finally, on the interwovenness of science and warfare (i.e. Taken together, these documents shed an intriguing light on the vicissitudes of budding life sciences research during the post-war era.
If subjected to a (psychoanalytically inspired) comparative analysis, multiple correspondences between movie and memoirs can be brought to the fore. In this paper I intend to show that there is much more to this title than merely its familiar ring. In the preface, he diffidently points out that the title (which presents him as the ‘third’ man credited with the co-discovery of the structure of DNA, besides Watson and Crick) was chosen by his publisher, as a reference to the famous 1949 movie no doubt, featuring Orson Welles in his classical role as penicillin racketeer Harry Lime. In 2003, biophysicist and Nobel Laureate Maurice Wilkins published his autobiography entitled The Third Man.
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