“I’m an avid reader,” says Lisa Jardine, director of the AHRB Research Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at London’s Queen Mary and Westfield College. Despite being chair of judges for the 2002 Booker Prize for Fiction, she still finds time to feed her non-fiction addiction.
She has just read and loved Brenda Maddox’s Rosalind Franklin (HarperCollins), which is a serious, full-length biography of the unsung heroine of the discovery of DNA. As good scientific biographies always do, it gave some startling insights into her chosen field, crystallography, as well as the buccaneering Crick-Watson partnership that gave us modern genetics.…
