Brenda Maddox > Quotes

“The fact is that in two unhappy years, working in isolation except for Gosling, in a field new to her, she had come within two steps of answering the most exciting question in post-war science. What is more, she, unknowingly, had provided all the essential data for those who took the two brilliant leaps of intuition — to anti-parallel chains and base pairs — that cracked the problem.”
― Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA

“By and large, people who choose to go into science are not greatly interested in psychological problems... He liked the exactness of science, and the perfection of its truths - Humanity could be rather messy in comparison.”
― Brenda Maddox

“In 1987, Hutton’s eighteenth-century discovery was acclaimed by the eminent science writer, Stephen Jay Gould. In Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, he wrote of Hutton: ‘He burst the boundaries of time, thereby establishing geology’s most distinctive and transforming contribution to human thought – Deep Time.’35 The discovery, said Gould, imposed a ‘great temporal limitation’ upon human importance: ‘the notion of an almost incomprehensible immensity, with human habitation restricted to a millimicrosecond at the very end!”
― Brenda Maddox, Reading the Rocks: How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life

“In the 1830s geology was more than new: it was fashionable.”
― Brenda Maddox, Reading the Rocks: How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life

“Elizabeth David’s highly popular book Mediterranean Cooking”
― Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA

“It has been suggested that she was plodding, that she could not understand her own data or work in teams, accept criticism or use imagination. That none of these alleged inadequacies manifested themselves in Rosalind’s work on viruses or coal is ignored by her detractors”
― Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA