Brenda Maddox – författare

The untold story of the woman who helped to make one of humanity’s greatest discoveries – DNA – but who was never given credit for doing so.‘Our dark lady is leaving us next week.’ On 7 March 1953 Maurice Wilkins of King’s College, London, wrote to Francis Crick at the Cavendish laboratories in Cambridge to say that as soon as his obstructive female colleague was gone from King's, he, Crick, and James Watson, a young American working with Crick, could go full speed ahead with solving the structure of the DNA molecule that lies in every gene. Not long after, the pair whose names will be forever linked announced to the world that they had discovered the secret of life.But could Crick and Watson have done it without the ‘dark lady’? In two years at King’s, Franklin had made major contributions to the understanding of DNA. She established its existence in two forms, she worked out the position of the phosphorous atoms in its backbone. Most crucially, using X-ray techniques that may have contributed significantly to her later death from cancer at the tragically young age of thirty-seven, she had taken beautiful photographs of the patterns of DNA.This is the extraordinarily powerful story of Rosalind Franklin, told by one of our greatest biographers; the single-minded young scientist whose contribution to arguably the most significant discovery of all time went unrecognised, elbowed aside in the rush for glory, and who died too young to recover her claim to some of that reputation, a woman who was not the wife of anybody and who is a myth in the making. Like a medieval saint, Franklin looms larger as she recedes in time. She has become a feminist icon, the Sylvia Plath of molecular biology. This will be a full and balanced biography, that will examine Franklin’s abruptness and tempestuousness, her loneliness and her relationships, the powerful family from which she sprang and the uniqueness of the work in which she was engaged. It is a vivid portrait, in sum, of a gifted young woman drawn against a background of women’s education, Anglo-Jewry and the greatest scientific discovery of the century.

"A meticulous biography . . . [Rosalind Franklin] was the unacknowledged heroine of DNA, the Sylvia Plath of molecular biology." —The EconomistLos Angeles Times Book Prize Winner for Science and TechnologyIn March 1953 Maurice Wilkins of King''s College London, announced the departure of his obstructive colleague, Rosalind Franklin to rival Cavendish Laboratory scientist, Francis Crick. But it was too late. Franklin''s unpublished data and crucial photograph of DNA had already been seen by her competitors at the Cambridge University lab. With the aid of these, plus their own knowledge, Watson and Crick discovered the structure of the molecule that genes are composed of—DNA. Five years later, Rosalind died of ovarian cancer. In 1962 Wilkins, Crick and Watson were awarded the Nobel Prize. Franklin''s part was forgotten until she was caricatured in Watson''s book The Double Helix.In this full and balanced biography award-winning writer Brenda Maddox tells the powerful story of a remarkably single-minded, forthright and tempestuous young woman who was airbrushed out of the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century."A sensitive, sympathetic look at a woman whose life was greater than the sum of its parts." —New York Times Book Review"Lively, absorbing and even handed . . . What emerges is the complex portrait of a passionate, flawed, courageous women." —Washington Post Book World"Brenda Maddox has done a great service to science and history." —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

Who was Margaret Thatcher? Her influence on politics is well documented - not least by Lady Thatcher herself. What no one has attempted before this book by award-winning biographer Brenda Maddox, is to present the personal story of the woman who has been described as 'the most significant Englishwoman since Elizabeth I'.Brenda Maddox traces the life of the grocer's daughter from Grantham who became the most successful Conservative Prime Minister of the twentieth century. Unprecedented access to people who knew her throughout her life, (some who have never spoken before) enables the author to paint a fully rounded portrait of a woman who - even after her death - is still both vilified and adored. Through the eyes of her contemporaries we begin to understand this extraordinary woman, whose shadow still falls accross British life.

A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017A rich and exuberant group biography of the first geologists, the people who were first to excavate from the layers of the world its buried history. These first geologists were made up primarily, and inevitably, of gentlemen with the necessary wealth to support their interests, yet boosting their numbers, expanding their learning and increasing their findings were clergymen, academics – and women. This lively and eclectic collection of characters brought passion, eccentricity and towering intellect to geology and Brenda Maddox in Reading the Rocks does them full justice, bringing them to vivid life. The new science of geology was pursued by this assorted band because it opened a window on Earth’s ancient past. They showed great courage in facing the conflict between geology and Genesis that immediately presented itself: for the rocks and fossils being dug up showed that the Earth was immeasurably old, rather than springing from a creation made in the six days that the Bible claimed. It is no coincidence that Charles Darwin was a keen geologist.The individual stories of these first geologists, their hope and fears, triumphs and disappointments, the theological, philosophical and scientific debates their findings provoked, and the way that as a group, they were to change irrevocably and dramatically our understanding of the world is told by Brenda Maddox with a storyteller’s skill and a fellow scientist’s understanding. The effect is absorbing, revelatory and strikingly original.