Crystallography

The most enigmatic character of all was Franklin. In a severely unflattering portrait, Watson in The Double Helix depicted Franklin as a woman who was unreasonable, secretive, chronically uncooperative, and-this seemed especially to irritate him-almost willfully unsexy. He allowed that she БЂњwas not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes,БЂ«but in this she disappointed all expectations. She didnБЂ™t even use lipstick, he noted in wonder, while her dress sense БЂњshowed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents.БЂ«[44] However, she did have the best images in existence of the possible structure of DNA, achieved by means of X-ray crystallography, the technique perfected by Linus Pauling. Crystallography had been used successfully to map atoms in crystals (hence БЂњcrystallographyБЂ«), but DNA molecules were a much more finicky proposition. Only Franklin was managing to get good results from the process, but to WilkinsБЂ™s perennial exasperation she refused to share her findings ...»