The story takes place between King’s College London and Cambridge University, from the early 1950s to the present day.
London, 1952. Annie, a 14-year-old apprentice dressmaker, finds an envelope on the ground containing some strange photographs. With the help of Mark and other friends, she discovers, through a series of difficulties, adventures, and twists that among those images, there is Photo n. 51, the first photograph of DNA, taken by the scientist Rosalind Franklin.
In a noir climate full of emotions, the story is set against the backdrop of academic struggles, fought without exclusions of blows, to secure the paternity of a discovery that revolutionized biology, and that led to James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1962.
This novel is the fruit of the author’s imagination but set in a well-defined historical context and many of the characters and events related to the discovery of DNA structure are real. Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, Francis Crick, Linus Pauling, Maurice Wilkins, Raymond Gosling, and Jennifer Doudna are scientists who existed, as well as photograph number 51 of DNA.
DNA has now entered the collective imagination and offers many ideas for highly topical subjects, from genetic manipulation to police investigations. It is curious to know how the discovery of DNA took place in a noir film climate. Segrè’s novel returns its climate, made up of more or less legitimate actions, struggles between scientists, ambitions, low blows, final surprise.
