Her Hidden Genius by Marie Benedict – Book club
The full story of the discovery of DNA’s double helix
There is a fascinating, unsettling and tragic story behind the pivotal discovery of DNA’s helical structure almost 70 years ago, which resulted in a Nobel prize for three men.
In this episode, we discuss Her Hidden Genius. It’s the new book by Marie Benedict, a lawyer and best-selling author who unearths the historical stories of women who have left important legacies. In this her third book about a female scientist, Benedict chronicles the life of Rosalind Franklin, an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer who laboured for years to uncover the structure of DNA but whose research was secretly shared with two male scientists from a different institution – the famous Watson and Crick. They used her data to claim the discovery of DNA’s structure and ultimately win a Nobel prize for it, after Franklin died from cancer at just 37 year old.