The book noted as Black Helix is actually titled Double Helix?

Answer 1

I've never heard the 'phrase' the "Black Helix", but there is a book entitled "The Double Helix" written by James Watson, who along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins was awarded the nobel prize in 1953 for the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. Rosalind Franklin is also often noted as a significant contributor to the discovery of the structure since she produced the most coherent X-ray micrographs of DNA molecule. James Watson and Francis Crick are reputed to have accessed the information Rosalind collected via Maurice Wilkins and without directly including Rosalind in their collaboration to craft a realistic and useful structure for DNA. While this was one of the most significant breakthroughs in modern science, it is also a story that revealed a dark side to scientific exploration. This archtype of driven scientific exploration at any cost - he may be a jerk, but he is a great chemist, engineer, scientist, cast a shadow across scientific exploration for years.

Dr. James Watson was a wonderkind who won the nobel prize at a very young age. His heroic young American makes good abroad story also gives permission for scientists to maintain scientific investigation as one of the last bations of ethnic and intellectual exclusivity. Dr James Watson wrote his book as a very young man and therefore, maybe, should be forgiven some of arrogant impertinence of his point-of-view. He very much comes off in the book, as trying to belittle and discredit Rosalind Franklind and her work. Brenda Maddox wrote a biography of Rosalind Franklin that provides a very different picture of a heroine who was succeeding in spite of being of the enormous barriers facing a lone woman investigator in an all-masculine, british boy's club. She was truly an intellectual pioneer, first in her work on determine the structure of DNA through grueling and exacting X-ray structure work with equipment primative by today's standards and also importantly as a role model for scientists who fall outside the established cultural, ethnic and intellectual box many men live within.