Paperback: Sad life of science genius

Apparently Rosalind Franklin wouldn't have minded going uncredited in The Double Helix, her colleague James Watson's best seller about the discovery of DNA.

What she might have objected to was being called a mad frump who hoarded research and never did anything nice with her hair. She couldn't protest because she'd died nine years earlier, aged 37, from cancer - another fact Watson chose to omit.

Lucky then, that the "Sylvia Plath of molecular biology" has found such a sensitive biographer. Maddox avoids the obvious plot line - that an unmarried Jewish woman had a hard time in the world of 1950s genetics isn't, after all, that surprising. But Franklin's other story, of unrequited love and unfinished business, is terribly sad.