Wednesday 24 November 2010

An Inconvenient Woman

And a personal heroine of mine, though I suspect she was as prickly as a porcupine from having to take so much misogynistic rubbish all her life.

Rosalind Franklin. And a play about her contribution to the discovery of the Double Helix of DNA: Photograph 51.

As an aside... I wrote about Dr Franklin on 20th July, 2005. Right in the middle of Hormone Hell, still not entirely convinced I wasn't going crackers, losing 0.5Kg (over a pound) a day in body mass, body feminising rapidly from "causes unknown", still trying to Grok that my days of doing the Boy Act were likely to be over in 12 months (actually more like 30 days...). And very insecure about my own gender - could a geek like me really be a woman?

Dr Franklin was an inspiration there. Still is.

For little did I know that in five years time, I'd be doing a PhD in computational chemistry, and relying on X-ray crystalography to tell me how reliable my methodology of determining molecular shapes was. A change of sex was foreseeable - but not something as off-the-wall unlikely as that.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"0.5Kg"

Just so you know, this should be written as "0.5 kg". It's best to follow the proper symbol usage.