Lab Coat: Robe of Innocence or Klansman’s Sheet?

Abstract

Lest anyone believe that science has begun to falter under the increasingly public examination by feminist scholars, let us hear the words of James Watson, the wonder boy from Harvard, a man of ebullient stupidity and callousness, who nonetheless won the Nobel Prize with Crick and Wilkens for describing the double helical structure of DNA. This smug triumvirate, admittedly racing to win a Nobel Prize for their work, had their inspiration, coincidentally enough, after illicitly viewing the unpublished crystallographic pictures produced by Rosalind Franklin, whom Watson patronized as “Rosy” in his gossipy book, in which she was worthy of mention only because of her “dowdy” appearance and “difficult” personality.¹

Finally, an ideological bias can lead a critical reader to make a given text say more than it apparently says, that is, to find out what in that text is ideologically presupposed, untold. In this movement from the ideological subcodes of the interpreter to the ideological subcodes tentatively attributed to the author … even the most closed texts are surgically “opened”: fiction is transformed into document and the innocence of fancy is translated into the disturbing evidence of a political statement.

—Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader