“Photograph 51” - A Play by Anna Ziegler

A play about Rosalind Franklin, told from her perspective

[Photograph 51 - The Full Script]

[Seattle Repertory Theater: A Study Guide for Photograph 51]

Rosalind Franklin should be one of those people who do not need to be introduced. This is what inspired me to include the play “Photograph 51” in my curricular toolkit for queering science education. Several movies have been made about the history of the discovery of DNA, the most popular being “The Race for the Double Helix” from 1987. It is not a bad movie, but it is a limited movie in that it portrays one dominant perspective that centers Francis Crick and James Watson. We do learn about Rosalind Franklin, but it is more of a side story. “Photograph 51” changes that by centering the narrative of the woman who has, for too long, been overlooked. The format of a play allows for additional layers of experience and nuanced learning that can be particularly evocative, memorable, and generative. This would be one specific way of making science education more interdisciplinary, accessible, and humanized.

Reviews of the play:

"Were the play simply to assert that Franklin was robbed of the prestige that was rightly hers - it would serve a valid but rather worthy purpose. It's much more fascinating than that, though. It deals with timely feminist issues but also the key fundamentals of how we relate to each other, who we are, our tragic flaws...A triumph."

- The Telegraph

"An illuminating kind of theatrical X-ray... Photograph 51 neatly coils a scientific detective story around a rumination on how sexism, personality and morality can impact collaboration and creativity...It honors Franklin by painting her as a complete person, with flaws and sterling attributes, and by evoking the thrills and risks of scientific pursuit itself."

- The Seattle Times