A Play: Photograph 51
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| Photo 51: X-ray difraction pattern of DNA |
During the Ada Lovelace Day celebrations last month I attended a very interesting talk by Dr. Emily Grossman. As well as some great thoughts on tackling the problem of underrepresentation of women in STEM subjects (some of which can be found in my last post here) she also recommended seeing the play 'Photograph 51' - in fact what she said was along the lines of, 'Beg, borrow or steal a ticket - just see it any way you can!' Well, who am I to turn down a Doctor's advice?
So 7 o'clock in the morning on Saturday 21st November sees me queueing up outside the Noel Coward theatre, London, with around 40-50 other people. It was quite a magical experience and I had no need for the book in my bag ('My Own Story' by Emmeline Pankhurst herself - it's incredible, read it now!) because it turns out that people who queue up at 7am on a Saturday in November to see plays about scientists are jolly nice people! So it was with a gaggle of new queue friends that I watched the first snow of the year fall in Leicester Square. It's moments like that - and like when my rather less new but just as lovely friend joined us bringing me tea and the most delicious pastry in all of London - that remind you just how brilliant people are.
What's more, we got tickets! We just missed out on seats but being a 'Stander' proved not too uncomfortable and we also had an excellent view of the action - and my, was it worth viewing.
Photograph 51 tells the story of Rosalind Franklin (Doctor Franklin!), her colleagues at King's College London, their relationship with Watson & Crick and the discovery of the structure of DNA. It's a complex rollercoaster of a tale and Anna Ziegler's fantastically well-written play does far more justice to it than I ever could in a few short words here. Not only is it a fascinating insight into the minds behind one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 1950s but it depicts realistically, without exagerrating for effect, all of the many and subtle difficulties that Franklin (played very well* by Nicole Kidman - hence the need to queue up for 4 hours on the day to get an affordable ticket) faced as a female scientist in that era. It is an impressivley balanced portayal of the characters and never melodramatic, sprinkled with humour, at times to lighten the mood, at times to make a point yet more poiganant and at times, I am sure, to let the eternal PhD student Gosling make jokes about postgraduate studies that only a PhD could make (nice to know that even 50 years ago it could feel like it would never end!)."Now I know why you care so much about women in science,", my friend said to me afterwards. (I had geared myself up for this story by listening to the incredible Prof. Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell telling the story of the Nobel Prize that her supervisor received for her discovery of pulsars on the brilliant 'Life Scientific' on the train to London...)
The message is not forced down your throat - and is more effective for it - but it is clear that it is this: had one key memeber of the team (Franklin) not had to face bias after both conscious and unconscious bias throughout her life, the story would have been very different and the discovery, which earned Watson, Crick and Franklin's 'supervisor' Wilkins a Nobel Prize, most likely made much earlier.
(For a mor professional review, see here!)
* Award-winningly, in fact! BBC, Guardian
A Pilgrimage: Ada Lovelace Exhibition, The Science Museum, London
Also in the previous post you may have noticed that I go on and on and on and on about Ada Lovelace. I'm not even sorry. She was incredible and her legacy lives on in so many ways! I shall continue to get excited about and inspired by her and to share that with anyone who'll listen!
It is because of this that the aforementioned tea-and-pastry-bringing, play-going friend was dragged, directly after having secured our tickets and being stood in the cold for many hours, to that hall of wonders, The Science Museum, London. For once I wasn't drawn in by the engines and spaceships but went directly to the small room close to where half of Charles Babbage's brain used to sit in a jar (the Maths & Computing section is being updated!) in which you can find parts of the Difference Engine, a miniature Jacquard Loom, and Analytical Engine model and many of Ada's letters.
Small though it may be, there are many gems to be discovered in this little room and it is well worth a visit!
After the play we made a cultural exchange (my friend being of an artistic background) and went to the National Portrait Gallery - embarassingly, my first time there! An excellent finale* to our incredibly cultured day and I also managed to pick up one of these snazzy coasters (my tea has never felt so righteous!) and a postcard of Emmeline Pankhurst (seriously, read her book, it's very accessible one of the best things you'll ever read!).
*Though the man playing the flaming tuba we passed on the way to the train station was really the icing on the cake...
