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Brian Lehrer: This is Brian Lehrer on WNYC. In honor of Women's History Month, we're going to end the show today by talking about some of the important contributions women have made to the field of science, particularly one woman, and how those histories are taught. A new nonfiction picture book for young readers examines the life of Rosalind Franklin. Do you know that name? The groundbreaking chemist who helped discover the structure of DNA. Her X-ray diffraction photograph showed the double helix structure of DNA, which, spoiler alert, led to her male colleagues winning the Nobel Prize in 1962.

Back with us again now is author, Tanya Lee Stone. She runs the writing program at Champlain College in Vermont and is the author of several books on unsung women heroes, including her latest, Remembering Rosalind Franklin. Tanya, welcome back to WNYC.

Tanya Lee Stone: Hi, Brian. Thanks so much for having me back.

Brian Lehrer: Why Rosalind Franklin and why in a picture book, which I guess means it's for really little kids, right?

Tanya Lee Stone: Yes. Picture books are typically for, as young as four, all the way up to ten, and nonfiction picture books, of course, skew a little bit older than that for obvious reasons of all of the content, right?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Tanya Lee Stone: Why her? Why now?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Tanya Lee Stone: Well, we have done a very good job telling our cis white male histories in this country for a very long time, and I just often feel really compelled to contribute to filling in some of the many missing gaps of other extraordinary people who have shaped our world who have been left out of the narrative.

Brian Lehrer: For people who may not know about Rosalind Franklin, tell us more about her contribution to discovering the structure of DNA.

Tanya Lee Stone: Yes, so if you've heard, kids don't really necessarily know what DNA is or what the structure of DNA is at the time that they read this book. Of course, I'm sure most of our adult listening world does. At the time, in the early '50s, scientists knew what DNA was, but they hadn't yet definitively determined that it carried the genetic code, and it wasn't fully understood how hereditary information was passed from parents to children. In other words, why you might look very much like one of your parents.

Scientists were trying to learn more about DNA structure. James Watson and Francis Crick were working on it, as was Linus Pauling Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin. Her contribution became essentially a missing piece that allowed Watson and Crick to accurately complete their model, that they were working on simultaneously.

Brian Lehrer: The first line in your book, I did that little spoiler alert in the intro is, "Dear Reader, this true story doesn't really have a happy ending." Is that about only the guys getting the Nobel Prize?

Tanya Lee Stone: No, it's not just about that, sadly. She passed away at the young age of 35 from cancer that was certainly contributed from the radiation in the science that she was doing.

Brian Lehrer: Well, that's so sad. I did not know that. A lot of the book is about Rosalind as a young girl and young woman. She loved climbing mountains, loved math, even the fashion. Why was it important to start with her childhood story?

Tanya Lee Stone: Well, any time I'm telling a story for young readers about a person's life, I want to be able to allow them to really make that emotional connection between them and this person, so that history comes a little bit more alive and real for them, especially when we're talking about somebody who hasn't been alive for quite a while or they've never heard of, to put in those things that really makes that person that person and have their personality shine through, allows readers to say, "Oh, I love to climb mountains and I love math," and connect to the story right from the beginning.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a couple of calls for Tanya Lee Stone. Anybody involved in your own life as a parent or a guardian or teacher about teaching women's contribution to science. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Which women's stories do you choose to pass on? What have been the reactions from the children in your lives? As Tanya said, the white cis male stories have been so well told. What woman in science story have you been particularly interested in, and especially if you've passed it on to any kids? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Tanya Lee Stone's new book, Remembering, I said Rosalind, but I guess it's Rosalind because that's how you said it, Franklin. In order to explain her contribution, you had to explain the concept of DNA to young readers, as you mentioned before. How do you do it for like four-year-olds to talk about DNA or heredity?

Tanya Lee Stone: That's a great question. Always, my first step is to really take a moment and assume nothing, and make sure that I understand whatever topic is, whatever big concept is, that I am about to present to young readers. Then I think about how I would explain it to a young person without context who might be sitting in the same room with me.

I talk out loud a lot when I'm working. Picture books are meant to be read aloud, so I'm always trying out how my sentences sound and how they might come across to a child who might be sitting in the same room with me, and relate the concepts to other concepts that they do have context for.

For example, when I explained DNA in this book, I wrote, "DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid. It is the genetic code inside every cell of every living thing. It's what makes you, you. DNA holds the instructions for any organism to grow, survive, and reproduce, whether it's a plant, a puppy, a platypus, or every person on the planet." Then it breaks it down in a way that they can wrap their mind around it.

Of course, the visual storytelling layer also helps tremendously with that. In a picture book, that's the work of the illustrator. That's the other half of a team in a picture book. They bring an enormous amount of storytelling and information to a double-page spread of a picture book that you imagine reading out loud and showing the pictures to a young reader as you're reading it.

Brian Lehrer: We've instantly gotten a lot of phone calls after putting out an invitation, and we only have a few minutes, so let's get a few people in here real quick. One is Caroline in lower Manhattan who says she knew Rosalind Franklin's brother.

Tanya Lee Stone: Wow.

Brian Lehrer: Is that right, Caroline?

Caroline: Yes, it is. He was a book dealer near Oxford, a used to be a book dealer. One day I asked him, I said, "Is Rosalind related to you?" He said, "Yes, that was my sister." He never talked about her. I think that the triple disappointment, she was a woman, she was Jewish, and she was dead before the Nobel Prize was given.

Tanya Lee Stone: That's right.

Caroline: It's supremely unfair that the Nobel Prize cannot be given posthumously. That's stupid.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Thank you, Caroline. We have another caller, who I'm not going to take because it will be redundant, but asking if there is some prize or some way to give a posthumous prize to Rosalind Franklin for her work. Do you know?

Tanya Lee Stone: I don't think that there is. I don't know, but she's certainly been honored in many ways. There's the Rosalind Franklin Institute, there are schools named after her, and now we're telling her story, which is one way to honor her. The whole reason that I do this, and I find topics for young readers is to excite them and plant seeds about people who they really should know about, even if they haven't read about it in their history or science textbooks in elementary or middle school or high school, so that I can capture who these people really were, and they can go maybe when they're older and be inspired to learn more about them and spark their curiosity. I hope that I'm helping to honor her legacy as well as other women and other people.

Brian Lehrer: With Watson and Crick winning the Nobel Prize for that, even though it included her work, if people want to get really angry, they can read this from your book. Imagine a scientist writing about one of his colleagues this way. This was something Watson wrote. "Clearly, Rosie..." a nickname she did not like, "...had to go or be put in her place. There was no denying she had a good brain. If she could only keep her emotions under control..." oh my God, that stereotype, "...there would be a good chance that she could really help." Whoa.

Tanya Lee Stone: She could really help.

Brian Lehrer: Savik in Astoria, you're on WNYC. Hi, Savik. Did I say your name right?

Savik: Hi, yes, thank you, yes, absolutely. I wanted to talk about a couple of-- I'm an astronomer and I wanted to talk about a couple of fairly famous women astronomers who, similar to Rosalind Franklin, but in different ways, also were overlooked by the Nobel committee,

Jocelyn Bell-Burnell and Vera Rubin. Jocelyn Bell-Burnell is actually still alive and famously as a graduate student discovered pulsars, which are a form of dead stars or neutron stars that end up massive stars at the end of their lives can end up in that form. The Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of pulsars to her male thesis supervisor and another senior male collaborator and that's an infamous story in my field. Fortunately, you were talking, the previous caller asked about alternative prizes, and Jocelyn Bell-Burnell is in fact still alive and was recently awarded the Breakthrough Prize, which the Nobel Prize, apart from the Prestige comes with about a million dollars, the Breakthrough Prize comes with $3 million.

Brian Lehrer: Wow and, Savik, that's going to have to be the last word because we're about out of time in the show.

Tanya Lee Stone: Amazing.

Brian Lehrer: I want to thank Tanya Lee Stone, who runs the Writing Program at Champlain College in Vermont, and is the author of several books on unsung heroes, including her latest. Maybe you want this for your kids, Remembering Rosalind Franklin. Thanks so much for coming on. We have 10 seconds if you want to react to Savik. You sounded into it.

Tanya Lee Stone: Oh, I think that's an amazing thing and I hope she helps to tell those stories. I just want to reflect just for a second about why these missing stories of women in STEM are so important. Girls today know a lot more about women's contributions than say I did growing up and it's still important to make sure that all people who shape our world are known in our history books not just some people. Thanks-

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely. Thank you so much. Thank you very much.

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