This is a very good fictionalized examination of Rosalind Franklin's career as a scientist in 1940s and 1950s England and France. She came from a wealthy family and didn't need to work, but she loved science and chose her work as a scientist over the objections of her parents and other family members. Franklin worked for a period in France, then moved back to London to take a position at Kings College researching the structure of DNA. After nearly two years of dedicated research, her work was stolen and used as the basis for Francis Crick's and James Watson's articles declaring the structure of DNA to be a double helix, for which they later won the Nobel Prize. Rosalind Franklin's contributions to this discovery were not recognized until after Jame Watson published his memoir in which he denigrated both her work and character, and Franklin's friends made an effort to correct the record. It is now widely acknowledged that it was her work that provided the evidence needed to identify the structure of DNA as a double helix, and this book provides an entertaining albeit infuriating fictionalized history of how all of that came to pass. It took me a while to get into the book, but once going it was hard to put down.
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