Unguardedly, Wilkins showed Franklin's photos to Crick and Watson without her permission. Max Perutz, another Cambridge-based scientist, also passed the model-builders a confidential report, including Franklin's detailed notes and X-ray photographs, which he had received as part of his Medical Research Council duties evaluating the King's unit. Rosalind Franklin remained virtually unknown outside her immediate circles until 1968 when Watson published The Double Helix , his brilliant, tactless and exciting personal account of the discovery. In it, she is the terrible Rosy, the bad-tempered bluestocking who hoarded her data and might have been pretty if she had taken off her glasses and done something interesting with her hair. She looked quite different to the eminent physics professor J.D. Bernal, who brought her to Birkbeck in the spring and oversaw her five happy and productive years there. He described her in Nature: 'As a scientist. Miss Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook Her photographs are among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken.' But Bernal's words were elegiac. Rosalind Franklin's life was cut short by ovarian cancer in 1958 when she was thirty-seven - four years before Watson, Crick and Wilkins won the Nobel prize for their DNA discovery and a decade before she was caricatured in a book to which, alone of the principals portrayed, she was unable to answer back. In March 1953 Maurice Wilkins of King's College London announced the departure of his obstructive colleague, Rosalind Franklin to rival