Lab Coat: Robe of Innocence or Klansman’s Sheet?

Lest anyone believe that science has begun to falter under the increasingly public examination by feminist scholars, let us hear the words of James Watson, the wonder boy from Harvard, a man of ebullient stupidity and callousness, who nonetheless won the Nobel Prize with Crick and Wilkens for describing the double helical structure of DNA. This smug triumvirate, admittedly racing to win a Nobel Prize for their work, had their inspiration, coincidentally enough, after illicitly viewing the unpublished crystallographic pictures produced by Rosalind Franklin, whom Watson patronized as “Rosy” in his gossipy book, in which she was worthy of mention only because of her “dowdy” appearance and “difficult” personality.1