There's something irresistible about plays that deal with iconic scientific discoveries, especially when controversy surrounds the people who make these finds--just think of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in __Copenhagen__. That play, by Michael Frayn, portrayed seminal discoveries about the structure of the atom made in the early 20th century. The second iconic discovery of that century--the molecular structure of DNA--was every bit as earthshaking, and is the subject of a new play, __Photograph 51__, written by Anna Ziegler.
__Franklin (Kristen Bush) and Donald Caspar
(Benjamin Peltesen) in __Photograph 51____
The drama centers on the story of X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin and her role in elucidating DNA's double-helical structure from 1951 to 1953. James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for this achievement. Franklin died from ovarian cancer in 1958, but had she lived, there is little possibility that she would have been tapped...
__Wilkins (Kevin Collins, left) and Watson
(Haskell King, right) view photograph 51 in the play__
__The Double Helix__, an elegant brief with no data. Elkin said that Wilkins suggested removing the phrase "beautiful photograph" from the mention of Franklin in the acknowledgments at the end of the paper.
Some choice scenes from the play Photograph 51.
Written by Anna Ziegler. Directed by Linsay Firman.
Wade insisted that there is no evidence that Franklin thought she had been ill treated: she left the Kings lab because she found it impossible to work with Wilkins, making one wonder how the story would have turned out if the two of them had maintained a good working relationship.Listen to the entire panel discussion



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