The Most Excellent Rosalind Franklin

She's not my hero because she was a crystallographer who probably solved the structure of DNA before Watson and Crick did, and she's not my hero because she was a woman scientist who put up with crap from lots of people, many of them men, because of who she was. She's my hero because in a letter to her dad (when she was at Cambridge as an undergraduate), she said something that I really believe in:

" I agree that faith is essential to success in life....In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall come nearer to success and that success in our aims (the improvment of the lot of mankind, present and future) is worth attaining." (arguing against her father's faith in life after death.)

I don't know what happens after we die, and it doesn't particularly matter to me and yes I know, if I'm reciting the apostles' creed every Sunday and going on about believing in resurrection and life everlasting then I'm a hypocrite, and yeah yeah yeah....but what we do here, during our own lives, is the only chance we have right now. Living for some unknowable future won't cure the ills of the world; we only get this shot at it, it has to be the best we can do, all the time, without exception.

Does this go against "going easy on oneself"? Only to the extent that going easy turns into sloth. Going easy on yourself is also part of doing your best, it has to be. If you're not all there because you don't take the time to stop and smell the proverbial roses, then you're not doing your best, you can't be.

I've been reading Brenda Maddox's book on Rosalind Franklin over breakfast for the last few days, snippets at a time; a review of the book indicates that it's more balanced than a previous work, and certainly less ridiculous than James Watson's portrayal of "Rosy" in The Double Helix. Franklin lived and worked during a time when women, and definitely not single Jewish women, weren't particularly welcome in the science world, and not in the hallowed halls of the British education system. That she survived at all had to be due to her fine mentors, and the fact that she didn't just roll up in a ball after Watson and Crick had a look at her data via unscrupulous means indicates that she had far more class than either of those two, or Maurice Wilkins for that matter, who helped out with the data-stealing. (sorry for the run-on sentence.) She did some excellent work on virus structure, and a lot of this just from precession photographs, nothing like the kind of data we get today. Makes one feel a bit like a spoiled brat, complaining about data quality...

I wanted to mention her because she worked at a very exciting time, and she did amazing stuff. She died at the age of 37 from ovarian cancer, before the Nobel prize was awarded to Watson and Crick in 1962 and therefore she couldn't receive it, as the award is not given posthumously. I am hoping that next week I will hear about a job interview; if that's the case then I will use the opportunity to aim higher, do better, train more people.......make a difference.