For this entry I\u2019m interested in thinking about \u2018actually\u2019 visualizing DNA.<\/p>\n
The double-helix is, famously, a structure, a model, something we\u2019ve never really been able to \u2018see\u2019 and so therefore lives as a theory, a concept, a presumption<\/a>. I\u2019m not, of course, denying it exists, but simply that we have had to work with it as a concept that we can prove rather than a thing we can see for decades. This matters, as \u2018ocular proof\u2019 is important to the historical imagination, but also because as DNA becomes increasingly part of people\u2019s self-definition the thing itself is important. Jenny Reardon argues this:<\/p>\n is genomics a domain that only members of the scientific and technological elite (e.g. the digirati) can understand and participate in? Or can it be democratized and extended to all persons (e.g., the lay public)? If it can be democratized, who counts as a person in the democratic polities that PG envisions?[1]<\/a><\/p>\n Having access \u2013 visual, imagined, material, or physical \u2013 to the stuff of life is key. Any translation or meditation process needs to be carefully examined for its ethical, power, and cultural implications. Similarly many philosophers and historians of science have pointed out that analogy, model, approximation, illustration, and the like, are all ways of translating theory into visual\/ material knowledge. They are methods for thinking about molecules in space, supposing and understanding the dimensionality of molecular structure. Dorothy Hodgkin\u2019s representation of insulin<\/a> is probably the most famous, after, of course, DNA. It is interesting how structures and models can often become substitutes for the \u2018real\u2019 thing, but, moreover, how those who reveal them \u2013 Hodgkin, Crick & Watson,<\/p>\n Mary B. Hesse argued this in 1966:<\/p>\n It is, of course, not the case that we can\u2019t \u2018see\u2019 DNA. Over the past few years several groups have reported that they had succeeded in visualizing DNA<\/a> directly. Enzo di Fabrizio and his team use an electron microscope and innovative techniques in \u2018mounting\u2019 the DNA to produce images. Bart Hoogenboom\u2019s team use Atomic Force Microscopy<\/a> to similarly visualize the structure (thanks to Phil East for the reference<\/a>). Yet this work is still extremely precise, relatively (at a nano-level) inexact, and not really popularly circulated. I would submit that the \u2018double-helix\u2019 is pretty much ingrained in the popular imagination, and it does powerful cultural, political, and intellectual work. A good example of this might be the opening credits to X-Men<\/em> (Bryan Singer, 2000), in which DNA mutates through a constantly shifting double helix.<\/p>\n Prompted by the Durham conference I started looking at the original paper published by Crick and Watson in their 1953 article “Molecular structure of nucleic acids; a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid”<\/a> Nature, 171: 4356 (1953), 737\u2013738. It is such a brief paper but so important. What is interesting for me at the moment is the way that the paper models the structure of DNA, which was all important in their description, and illustrates it:<\/p>\n If our understanding of DNA is founded upon an image, a model, a translation of something that was hitherto unseeable, then this is tremendously interesting. The foundation of life itself is unperceivable, apart, of course, in the physical actuality of the human beings walking around<\/a>. Indeed, the \u2018human\u2019 is the model of DNA made specific, the theory turned flesh.<\/p>\n Crick, Watson, the model<\/p>\n \u2018Photograph 51\u2019<\/p>\n This week has also led me to think a bit about the reputation of Rosalind Franklin. Any discussion of \u2018seeing\u2019 DNA has to come back to her X-ray photography and crystallography, and the impact it had on the development of the double-helix model.<\/p>\n This is how the 1953 article refers to her:<\/p>\n Whilst Crick & Watson<\/a> are, of course, the key people in the public imagination (Crick gives his name to the new genetic research Institute in London<\/a>, for instance), increasingly the work is understood as a collaboration or collection. For instance, the UK National Curriculum Key Stage 3 (ages 11-14) suggests the teaching of \u2018a simple model of chromosomes, genes and DNA in heredity, including the part played by Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Franklin in the development of the DNA model\u2019. Wikipedia lists numerous ways that Franklin is remembered and celebrated (under \u2018Posthumous recognition<\/a>\u2019, from about 1982), but public representation and popular articulation is relatively rare.<\/p>\n Nicole Kidman in Photograph 51<\/em><\/p>\n Anna Ziegler\u2019s<\/a> play Photograph 51<\/em>, which was developed in 2008 and premiered in New York in 2010, strives to \u2018see\u2019 Franklin. Its revival in 2015 in London with Nicole Kidman as Franklin<\/a> was an important moment in the public and popular rendering of her life and reputation (on this, why no films of the DNA \u2018race\u2019 other than the 1987 Life Story<\/a><\/em>?).<\/p>\n Critics responding to the play uniformly mentioned how Franklin\u2019s \u2018vital contribution to uncovering the structure of DNA has been marginalised<\/a>\u2019, her work \u2018had been, and still are to a great extent, sadly overlooked\u2019<\/a>, or how \u2018she has never been given the credit accorded to her rivals and colleagues\u2019<\/a>. Indeed, Steve Connor writes about how Ziegler\u2019s play \u2018attempts to redress the balance\u2019<\/a> and hence the text is clearly seen as something of a revisionist, reclamatory drama. It tells us something occluded, unseen, important but somehow unperceived. From a public history perspective the reclamation of Franklin\u2019s reputation is an important act.<\/p>\n Reading the playtext (having seen the show in London in 2016) I\u2019m struck by how Kidman made Franklin \u2018live\u2019 (something Ben Brantley in the New York Times<\/a> notes). The text itself is relatively cold, but Kidman\u2019s Franklin was a tremendous, precise, sometimes imperious presence. This interrelationship between the imagined (textualised) and the physical is of course the stuff of the play itself. The drama of DNA is found in the tension between model and thing, articulation and object.<\/p>\n Photograph 51 <\/em>makes DNA into a mysterious thing again, something pre-double-helix, something mystifying that cannot be reduced to a simple model; understanding it is the stuff of a life\u2019s work. It is part of the re-historicizing of DNA, a way of recollecting that such scientific work was produced at a very precise historical moment. Ziegler focuses on the \u2018story of the race to the double helix\u2019 although prefaces her play with a disclaimer: \u2018a work of fiction. I have altered timelines, facts and events, and recreated characters for dramatic purposes\u2019.[2]<\/a> It is a biographical drama on science, echoing Michael Frayn\u2019s Copenhagen<\/em> (1998) in its complex rendering of theoretical science through dramatizing human relationships. Revolving mainly around Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, and very fluidly staged, the play considers some key themes relating to DNA: what we can see, what we know, how we know it, how perspective matters, and the beauty of life. It also adds some particularly useful tropes from scientific biography: competition; the loneliness of research; the danger of pride.<\/p>\n The play resists the notion of DNA being \u2018authored\u2019 but instead shows how various characters, particularly Watson, self-dramatised the importance of particular moments (\u2018There\u2019s an element of fate to it\u2019 he says early in the play, \u2018To be born at the right time\u2019, p. 27; later, when Wilkins seems to reject working with him, he says \u2018Was it the biggest mistake of his life. Without question\u2019, p. 29). In particular, the moment Franklin sees Photograph 51 she \u2018becomes\u2019 different, somehow \u2013 although possibly without understanding it: \u2018And she stood there, staring at the photograph, as though she were looking in a mirror but was suddenly unrecognizable to herself\u2019 (p. 45). Drama often works by showing an audience the inside of someone\u2019s head, somehow \u2013 Copenhagen<\/em>\u2019s great contribution is to suggest that no one knows anything about the world other than that which they perceive \u2013 and Photograph 51<\/em> is in many ways about not understanding what one can see, the distinction between what is visual and what is known.<\/p>\n It also dramatizes the urge to investigate, and contrasts a kind of male will to \u2018control\u2019 with Franklin\u2019s more stolid devotion to \u2018the work\u2019. She is enthralled by the beauty of the natural world but not desiring to control it; in contrast, Don Caspar says this about X-ray photography:\u2019 as though you and you alone possess the superhuman powers that allow you to see into the heart of things. To understand the nature of the world as though it’s a secret no one else is meant to know\u2019 (p. 34). This sense of peering at nature is relatively common in scientific discourse, here given to a male character in echo of the hundreds of male scientists that have claimed to draw back the veil of nature. In contrast to this type of thinking about \u2018life\u2019, Ziegler suggests that male pomposity kept Franklin back, both in terms of preventing her from accessing key moments and also because her colleagues resented her manner and were less loyal to her than they might have been. She is inescapably the only woman onstage, unique but also isolated and alone. Two of the male scientists onstage seek to \u2018understand\u2019 and \u2018see\u2019 her properly, but they both fail eventually. She resists this, and is unknown to them \u2013 but not the audience, who \u2018see\u2019 her real character in an unspoken moment late in the play when she acknowledges her loneliness to herself but does not say it out loud.<\/p>\n Franklin\u2019s loneliness, her solitariness, her unique, non-doubled quality, is emphasised throughout. Glibly the play argues that \u2018There\u2019s no science that can explain it. Loneliness\u2019 (p. 71), suggesting a kind of melancholy that can\u2019t be understood \u2013 \u2018seen\u2019 \u2013 by scientific means. By making the search for DNA something that is expressed through one woman\u2019s lonely desire for meaning, the play personalises the science, makes it emotionally comprehendible, something that the audience can \u2018see\u2019. The human is the model of the DNA, the emotional body that navigates between molecule and time. Franklin\u2019s last, sad speech before her death \u2013 in answer to the question \u2018what do you want?\u2019 \u2013 reveals the play\u2019s concern with what has been lost, rather than what might be found: \u2018to be kissed, to feel important, to learn how to be okay being with other people, and also how to be alone. To be a child again, held up and admired, the world full of endless future\u2019 (p. 71). Throughout Franklin and Wilkins have discussed Peter Brook\u2019s 1951 production of The Winter\u2019s Tale <\/em>and this is an important intertext about sadness, loss, misplaced hope (although the joke \u2013 a meta-joke about Franklin and her status as the lost female scientist \u2013 is that neither of them can remember who played Hermione in the production (it was Diana Wynyard<\/a>).<\/p>\n Somewhat problematically the play seems to suggest that Franklin was unfulfilled and that her work was simply not enough \u2013 or that she worked so hard due to an unacknowledged emptiness. However, the sense of enquiry being a way of giving shape and meaning to that which is unknowable \u2013 life \u2013 is a key motif to the work. As she says before she dies, \u2018\u2019We lose. In the end, we lose. The work is never finished\u2019 (p. 75).<\/p>\n Photograph 51<\/em> has some address to clich\u00e9 \u2013 the Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em> intertext, the lonely childless female pioneer \u2013 but it also contributes to the surge in Franklin\u2019s public reputation and the various ways she might be imagined and celebrated. The play\u2019s concern with what is seen, and unseen, and with how different ways of looking might reveal many different things, similarly contributes to the wider comprehension of how visualisation contributed to the recognition of DNA (\u2018to Rosalind, making a model was tantamount to negligence\u2019 says Crick, p. 38).<\/p>\n The play\u2019s fluid range of concepts \u2013 it reaches post-war Britain, ambition, gender, investigation, plagiarism, sadness and higher mathematics \u2013 means that it is self-consciously complex. Historiographically it suggests that which has not been seen, and also reminds us that \u2018facts\u2019, even in relation to the \u2018revealing\u2019 of something true and real, might be more complicated than they first seem. However it also suggests that discovery is something that can only be understood and explained through a range of considerations \u2013 personal, chemical, economic, social, gendered. DNA is not \u2018seen\u2019 in Photograph 51<\/em>, but made even more complicated and beautiful.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Jenny Reardon, \u2018The \u201cpersons\u201d and \u201cgenomics\u201d of personal genomics\u2019, Personalized Medicine<\/em> 8:1 (2011), 95-107 (p. 96).<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Photograph 51<\/em> (London: Oberon books, 2015), p. 7.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_post_nav _builder_version=”3.0.106″ in_same_term=”off” show_prev=”on” show_next=”on” prev_text=”Previous” next_text=”Next” locked=”on” parent_locked=”off” \/][et_pb_comments _builder_version=”3.0.106″ show_avatar=”on” show_reply=”on” show_count=”on” background_layout=”light” header_font_size_tablet=”51″ header_line_height_tablet=”2″ custom_button=”on” button_icon_placement=”right” button_text_color=”#ffffff” button_use_icon=”off” locked=”on” parent_locked=”off” \/][et_pb_text admin_label=”Related posts” _builder_version=”3.0.106″ background_layout=”light” locked=”on” parent_locked=”off”]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”Contact Us” text_text_color=”#aaaaaa” parent_locked=”off” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid” module_class=”contact-us” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat” background_size=”initial”]<\/p>\n +44 (0) 161 306 6000<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_3″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Find Us Title” background_layout=”dark” text_text_color=”#ffffff” parent_locked=”off” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat” background_size=”initial”]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”Address” background_layout=”dark” text_orientation=”left” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid” module_id=”address” parent_locked=”off” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat” background_size=”initial”]<\/p>\n The University of Manchester [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_3″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Connect Title” background_layout=”dark” text_text_color=”#ffffff” parent_locked=”off” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat” background_size=”initial”]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_code admin_label=”Social Media” custom_css_main_element=”||” parent_locked=”off”]<ul class=”inlineList footer-socialIcons”><!– [et_pb_line_break_holder] –> <li><!– [et_pb_line_break_holder] –> <a href=”https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/TheUniversityOfManchester” onclick=”var href = this.href; 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In the main this means the ways that consumers of DNA testing might conceive of themselves in relation to a \u2018model\u2019 or structure of a double-helix. So I\u2019m really interested, for instance, in the phenomenon of \u2018DNA Art\u2019 that seeks to present the buyer with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":" Much of this project looks at how people visualise DNA. In the main this means the ways that consumers of DNA testing might conceive of themselves in relation to a \u2018model\u2019 or structure of a double-helix. So I\u2019m really interested, for instance, in the phenomenon of \u2018DNA Art\u2019<\/a> that seeks to present<\/em> the buyer with a \u2018self-portrait\u2019. There is also some really interesting \u2013 if creepy \u2013 art being made of \u2018left-behind\u2019 DNA, that is, genetic matter found lying around<\/a> (I\u2019m kind of convinced this last is a hoax)\u2026. That is covered in another blog.<\/p> For this entry I\u2019m interested in thinking about \u2018actually\u2019 visualizing DNA.<\/p> The double-helix is, famously, a structure, a model, something we\u2019ve never really been able to \u2018see\u2019 and so therefore lives as a theory, a concept, a presumption<\/a>. I\u2019m not, of course, denying it exists, but simply that we have had to work with it as a concept that we can prove rather than a thing we can see for decades. This matters, as \u2018ocular proof\u2019 is important to the historical imagination, but also because as DNA becomes increasingly part of people\u2019s self-definition the thing itself is important. Jenny Reardon argues this:<\/p> is genomics a domain that only members of the scientific and technological elite (e.g. the digirati) can understand and participate in? Or can it be democratized and extended to all persons (e.g., the lay public)? If it can be democratized, who counts as a person in the democratic polities that PG envisions?[1]<\/a><\/p> Having access \u2013 visual, imagined, material, or physical \u2013 to the stuff of life is key. Any translation or meditation process needs to be carefully examined for its ethical, power, and cultural implications. Similarly many philosophers and historians of science have pointed out that analogy, model, approximation, illustration, and the like, are all ways of translating theory into visual\/ material knowledge. They are methods for thinking about molecules in space, supposing and understanding the dimensionality of molecular structure. Dorothy Hodgkin\u2019s representation of insulin<\/a> is probably the most famous, after, of course, DNA. It is interesting how structures and models can often become substitutes for the \u2018real\u2019 thing, but, moreover, how those who reveal them \u2013 Hodgkin, Crick & Watson,<\/p> Mary B. Hesse argued this in 1966:<\/p> It is, of course, not the case that we can\u2019t \u2018see\u2019 DNA. Over the past few years several groups have reported that they had succeeded in visualizing DNA<\/a> directly. Enzo di Fabrizio and his team use an electron microscope and innovative techniques in \u2018mounting\u2019 the DNA to produce images. Bart Hoogenboom\u2019s team use Atomic Force Microscopy<\/a> to similarly visualize the structure (thanks to Phil East for the reference<\/a>). Yet this work is still extremely precise, relatively (at a nano-level) inexact, and not really popularly circulated. I would submit that the \u2018double-helix\u2019 is pretty much ingrained in the popular imagination, and it does powerful cultural, political, and intellectual work. A good example of this might be the opening credits to X-Men<\/em> (Bryan Singer, 2000), in which DNA mutates through a constantly shifting double helix.<\/p> Prompted by the Durham conference I started looking at the original paper published by Crick and Watson in their 1953 article \"Molecular structure of nucleic acids; a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid\"<\/a> Nature, 171: 4356 (1953), 737\u2013738. It is such a brief paper but so important. What is interesting for me at the moment is the way that the paper models the structure of DNA, which was all important in their description, and illustrates it:<\/p> If our understanding of DNA is founded upon an image, a model, a translation of something that was hitherto unseeable, then this is tremendously interesting. The foundation of life itself is unperceivable, apart, of course, in the physical actuality of the human beings walking around<\/a>. Indeed, the \u2018human\u2019 is the model of DNA made specific, the theory turned flesh.<\/p> Crick, Watson, the model<\/p> \u2018Photograph 51\u2019<\/p> This week has also led me to think a bit about the reputation of Rosalind Franklin. Any discussion of \u2018seeing\u2019 DNA has to come back to her X-ray photography and crystallography, and the impact it had on the development of the double-helix model.<\/p> This is how the 1953 article refers to her:<\/p> Whilst Crick & Watson<\/a> are, of course, the key people in the public imagination (Crick gives his name to the new genetic research Institute in London<\/a>, for instance), increasingly the work is understood as a collaboration or collection. For instance, the UK National Curriculum Key Stage 3 (ages 11-14) suggests the teaching of \u2018a simple model of chromosomes, genes and DNA in heredity, including the part played by Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Franklin in the development of the DNA model\u2019. Wikipedia lists numerous ways that Franklin is remembered and celebrated (under \u2018Posthumous recognition<\/a>\u2019, from about 1982), but public representation and popular articulation is relatively rare.<\/p> Nicole Kidman in Photograph 51<\/em><\/p> Anna Ziegler\u2019s<\/a> play Photograph 51<\/em>, which was developed in 2008 and premiered in New York in 2010, strives to \u2018see\u2019 Franklin. Its revival in 2015 in London with Nicole Kidman as Franklin<\/a> was an important moment in the public and popular rendering of her life and reputation (on this, why no films of the DNA \u2018race\u2019 other than the 1987 Life Story<\/a><\/em>?).<\/p> Critics responding to the play uniformly mentioned how Franklin\u2019s \u2018vital contribution to uncovering the structure of DNA has been marginalised<\/a>\u2019, her work \u2018had been, and still are to a great extent, sadly overlooked\u2019<\/a>, or how \u2018she has never been given the credit accorded to her rivals and colleagues\u2019<\/a>. Indeed, Steve Connor writes about how Ziegler\u2019s play \u2018attempts to redress the balance\u2019<\/a> and hence the text is clearly seen as something of a revisionist, reclamatory drama. It tells us something occluded, unseen, important but somehow unperceived. From a public history perspective the reclamation of Franklin\u2019s reputation is an important act.<\/p> Reading the playtext (having seen the show in London in 2016) I\u2019m struck by how Kidman made Franklin \u2018live\u2019 (something Ben Brantley in the New York Times<\/a> notes). The text itself is relatively cold, but Kidman\u2019s Franklin was a tremendous, precise, sometimes imperious presence. This interrelationship between the imagined (textualised) and the physical is of course the stuff of the play itself. The drama of DNA is found in the tension between model and thing, articulation and object.<\/p> Photograph 51 <\/em>makes DNA into a mysterious thing again, something pre-double-helix, something mystifying that cannot be reduced to a simple model; understanding it is the stuff of a life\u2019s work. It is part of the re-historicizing of DNA, a way of recollecting that such scientific work was produced at a very precise historical moment. Ziegler focuses on the \u2018story of the race to the double helix\u2019 although prefaces her play with a disclaimer: \u2018a work of fiction. I have altered timelines, facts and events, and recreated characters for dramatic purposes\u2019.[2]<\/a> It is a biographical drama on science, echoing Michael Frayn\u2019s Copenhagen<\/em> (1998) in its complex rendering of theoretical science through dramatizing human relationships. Revolving mainly around Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, and very fluidly staged, the play considers some key themes relating to DNA: what we can see, what we know, how we know it, how perspective matters, and the beauty of life. It also adds some particularly useful tropes from scientific biography: competition; the loneliness of research; the danger of pride.<\/p> The play resists the notion of DNA being \u2018authored\u2019 but instead shows how various characters, particularly Watson, self-dramatised the importance of particular moments (\u2018There\u2019s an element of fate to it\u2019 he says early in the play, \u2018To be born at the right time\u2019, p. 27; later, when Wilkins seems to reject working with him, he says \u2018Was it the biggest mistake of his life. Without question\u2019, p. 29). In particular, the moment Franklin sees Photograph 51 she \u2018becomes\u2019 different, somehow \u2013 although possibly without understanding it: \u2018And she stood there, staring at the photograph, as though she were looking in a mirror but was suddenly unrecognizable to herself\u2019 (p. 45). Drama often works by showing an audience the inside of someone\u2019s head, somehow \u2013 Copenhagen<\/em>\u2019s great contribution is to suggest that no one knows anything about the world other than that which they perceive \u2013 and Photograph 51<\/em> is in many ways about not understanding what one can see, the distinction between what is visual and what is known.<\/p> It also dramatizes the urge to investigate, and contrasts a kind of male will to \u2018control\u2019 with Franklin\u2019s more stolid devotion to \u2018the work\u2019. She is enthralled by the beauty of the natural world but not desiring to control it; in contrast, Don Caspar says this about X-ray photography:\u2019 as though you and you alone possess the superhuman powers that allow you to see into the heart of things. To understand the nature of the world as though it's a secret no one else is meant to know\u2019 (p. 34). This sense of peering at nature is relatively common in scientific discourse, here given to a male character in echo of the hundreds of male scientists that have claimed to draw back the veil of nature. In contrast to this type of thinking about \u2018life\u2019, Ziegler suggests that male pomposity kept Franklin back, both in terms of preventing her from accessing key moments and also because her colleagues resented her manner and were less loyal to her than they might have been. She is inescapably the only woman onstage, unique but also isolated and alone. Two of the male scientists onstage seek to \u2018understand\u2019 and \u2018see\u2019 her properly, but they both fail eventually. She resists this, and is unknown to them \u2013 but not the audience, who \u2018see\u2019 her real character in an unspoken moment late in the play when she acknowledges her loneliness to herself but does not say it out loud.<\/p> Franklin\u2019s loneliness, her solitariness, her unique, non-doubled quality, is emphasised throughout. Glibly the play argues that \u2018There\u2019s no science that can explain it. Loneliness\u2019 (p. 71), suggesting a kind of melancholy that can\u2019t be understood \u2013 \u2018seen\u2019 \u2013 by scientific means. By making the search for DNA something that is expressed through one woman\u2019s lonely desire for meaning, the play personalises the science, makes it emotionally comprehendible, something that the audience can \u2018see\u2019. The human is the model of the DNA, the emotional body that navigates between molecule and time. Franklin\u2019s last, sad speech before her death \u2013 in answer to the question \u2018what do you want?\u2019 \u2013 reveals the play\u2019s concern with what has been lost, rather than what might be found: \u2018to be kissed, to feel important, to learn how to be okay being with other people, and also how to be alone. To be a child again, held up and admired, the world full of endless future\u2019 (p. 71). Throughout Franklin and Wilkins have discussed Peter Brook\u2019s 1951 production of The Winter\u2019s Tale <\/em>and this is an important intertext about sadness, loss, misplaced hope (although the joke \u2013 a meta-joke about Franklin and her status as the lost female scientist \u2013 is that neither of them can remember who played Hermione in the production (it was Diana Wynyard<\/a>).<\/p> Somewhat problematically the play seems to suggest that Franklin was unfulfilled and that her work was simply not enough \u2013 or that she worked so hard due to an unacknowledged emptiness. However, the sense of enquiry being a way of giving shape and meaning to that which is unknowable \u2013 life \u2013 is a key motif to the work. As she says before she dies, \u2018\u2019We lose. In the end, we lose. The work is never finished\u2019 (p. 75).<\/p> Photograph 51<\/em> has some address to clich\u00e9 \u2013 the Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em> intertext, the lonely childless female pioneer \u2013 but it also contributes to the surge in Franklin\u2019s public reputation and the various ways she might be imagined and celebrated. The play\u2019s concern with what is seen, and unseen, and with how different ways of looking might reveal many different things, similarly contributes to the wider comprehension of how visualisation contributed to the recognition of DNA (\u2018to Rosalind, making a model was tantamount to negligence\u2019 says Crick, p. 38).<\/p> The play\u2019s fluid range of concepts \u2013 it reaches post-war Britain, ambition, gender, investigation, plagiarism, sadness and higher mathematics \u2013 means that it is self-consciously complex. Historiographically it suggests that which has not been seen, and also reminds us that \u2018facts\u2019, even in relation to the \u2018revealing\u2019 of something true and real, might be more complicated than they first seem. However it also suggests that discovery is something that can only be understood and explained through a range of considerations \u2013 personal, chemical, economic, social, gendered. DNA is not \u2018seen\u2019 in Photograph 51<\/em>, but made even more complicated and beautiful.<\/p> \u00a0<\/p>![\"\"](\"http:\/\/projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk\/double-helix-history\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screen-Shot-2017-12-05-at-13.46.49-300x141.png\")
[from Models and Analogies in Science<\/em> (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966), p. 1.] The interlinking of \u2018model\u2019, imagined structure, visualization, theory and cultural understanding is powerful. In discussion at the recent \u2018Molecules and Models \u2013 Seeing Structures\u2019<\/a> at Durham University\u2019s Centre for Visual Arts and Culture several people wondered about the pre-eminence, and centrality, of the double-helix in this phenomenon. I\u2019m particularly concerned, in my work, to think about how this relates to historical understanding and awareness. How does one conceive of the double helix in relation to the self? How does this relate to the DNA of others, particularly those in one\u2019s family tree?<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk\/double-helix-history\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screen-Shot-2017-11-27-at-15.03.50-228x300.png\")
The note at the bottom of the page here reads: \u2018This figure is purely diagrammatic<\/strong>. The two ribbons symbolize the two phosphate-sugar chains, and the horizontal rods the pairs of basis holding the pairs of bases holding the chains together. The vertical line marks the fibre axis\u2019 (my emphasis, p. 737). The point is that from the very beginning of our \u2018understanding\u2019 of the structure it was always something to be conceived of, illustrated, imagined, \u2018diagrammatic\u2019 rather than seen \u2013 as demonstrated by the famous model of DNA that Crick and Watson unveiled to the world (in contrast to the no less important, but less interpretable, \u2018Photograph 51\u2019 that Rosalind Franklin produced). DNA has a particular structure \u2013 they describe it \u2013 but it also must be illustrated in two-dimensions, rendered, articulated.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk\/double-helix-history\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/watson_crick-300x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk\/double-helix-history\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screen-Shot-2017-11-27-at-15.20.55-300x297.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk\/double-helix-history\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screen-Shot-2017-12-05-at-10.03.22-300x86.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk\/double-helix-history\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screen-Shot-2017-12-05-at-14.40.24-300x226.png\")
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[from Models and Analogies in Science<\/em> (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966), p. 1.] The interlinking of \u2018model\u2019, imagined structure, visualization, theory and cultural understanding is powerful. In discussion at the recent \u2018Molecules and Models \u2013 Seeing Structures\u2019<\/a> at Durham University\u2019s Centre for Visual Arts and Culture several people wondered about the pre-eminence, and centrality, of the double-helix in this phenomenon. I\u2019m particularly concerned, in my work, to think about how this relates to historical understanding and awareness. How does one conceive of the double helix in relation to the self? How does this relate to the DNA of others, particularly those in one\u2019s family tree?<\/p>The note at the bottom of the page here reads: \u2018This figure is purely diagrammatic<\/strong>. The two ribbons symbolize the two phosphate-sugar chains, and the horizontal rods the pairs of basis holding the pairs of bases holding the chains together. The vertical line marks the fibre axis\u2019 (my emphasis, p. 737). The point is that from the very beginning of our \u2018understanding\u2019 of the structure it was always something to be conceived of, illustrated, imagined, \u2018diagrammatic\u2019 rather than seen \u2013 as demonstrated by the famous model of DNA that Crick and Watson unveiled to the world (in contrast to the no less important, but less interpretable, \u2018Photograph 51\u2019 that Rosalind Franklin produced). DNA has a particular structure \u2013 they describe it \u2013 but it also must be illustrated in two-dimensions, rendered, articulated.<\/p><\/p><\/p><\/p><\/p>