All the world's a lab

摘要

Early on in Anna Ziegler's Photograph 51-a play about Rosalind Franklin and her role in the discovery of DNA's double-helix - there is a scene in which Franklin is admired by her hated research partner Maurice Wilkins. As Wilkins watches a ghost-like vision of Franklin cross the stage, US scientist Donald Caspar watches and compares Wilkins's confused fascination with her to the progress made by his rivals, James Watson and Francis Crick at the University of Cambridge. He says: "To Watson and Crick, the shape of something suggested the most detailed analysis of its interior workings. As though by looking at something you could determine how it came to be... how it gets through each day." Caspar is talking both about the pair's approach to unravelling the structure of DNA and about Wilkins's struggle to understand Franklin - an incompatibility that arguably let Watson and Crick nab their Nobel.