Rachel Carson came from a farm background. She started her university life enrolled in English Literature but, after two years, was increasingly drawn to the natural sciences, so brilliantly that she completed her normal four-year course, in one. After some years teaching, she became only the second female scientist with the US Fisheries and Wildlife Service where, initially, she put her literary skills to good purpose, editing departmental publications and conducting radio sessions, all to a very high standard which attracted much complimentary comment.

In 1951 she published The Sea Around Us, which remained on the bestseller list for 86 weeks straight and brought her many honours from learned societies. Her marine work soon alerted her to the dangers of increasing and uncontrolled pollution, especially from DDT, and she used her public profile to actively question and criticise. She thus soon attracted the opprobrium of those responsible being, as a spinster, labelled cruelly "The Nun of Nature" and other odious epithets. She continued undaunted and eventually published her concerns in 1962 as Silent Spring – a turning point in world public awareness and concern.

This brought increasingly vehement denunciation, not only and predictably from the chemical industry but from those who should have been acting to correct the abuses, including Government agencies and professional organisations like the US Food and Drug Administration, the US Department of Agriculture and the American Medical Association. Objective truth quickly became another victim. Rachel left her job and devoted her remaining years to the furtherance of this cause. She was not totally friendless, with some support from the popular press and some influential organisations. Vilification lessened but did not totally die after President Kennedy and Prince Phillip both gave her active support. By now the cancer that killed her in 1964 at the age of 56 was causing severe debilitation and she had to withdraw from public life, having alerted the world to one of mankind's worst self-imposed and emerging threats. She was a remarkable and courageous woman.

Rosalind Franklin came from a wealthy, conservative London background, with a father who did not agree with higher education for girls. She was unable to attend university until her mother forced her father to relent by threatening to pay the fees. Rosalind graduated in 1941 and worked on coal research, publishing papers, which are still, quoted today, including seminal papers on the current high-tech, high strength carbon fibres field. She decided that she needed to master the field of x-ray crystallography and in doing so she pioneered and developed different directions for its application – an outcome that had profound implications for research into DNA.

In 1951 after some time in Paris she was head-hunted to join a research team at London University's King's College headed by John Randall, the inventor/discoverer of RADAR. The objective was to explore and expand on what little was known of DNA and Rosalind was the x-ray specialist. At the time DNA's structure and its role in heredity were unsuspected and unknown. Late in that year she gave a lecture on the project and her work attended by Watson who was working at Cambridge with Crick on the same field but who were then less advanced. Watson contemptuously dismissed Rosalind's work as being irrelevant.

However, in early 1953 Watson and Crick were given Rosalind's data without her knowledge or permission and quickly realised just how much further this stolen material took them. They made revisions of their work to take advantage of it. In March of 1953 Watson and Crick published 'their' findings in "Nature" with only a brief reference to Rosalind's team and none at all to her. She left King's College after becoming more disenchanted with her treatment and the prevailing anti-female atmosphere. She moved to Birbank College in the same University where she headed her own research team but was again disappointed. The funding agency refused to continue support to any project that was headed by a woman. She did, however, have time to produce two very advanced papers on DNA, the relevance of which has only recently been understood. She then worked in the USA until 1955 when she was diagnosed with cancer and returned home to die in 1958.

In 1962 Watson and Crick received the Nobel Prize. Their acceptance speech cited 98 references but not one referred to Rosalind Franklin. Six years later, Watson wrote The Double Helix in which he did mention Rosalind but only to utterly denigrate her both personally and professionally. Many who knew of her and her work sprang to her defence and, in a later edition of the book, Watson grudgingly added an epilogue acknowledging her professional quality and personal worth but still without crediting her with the fundamental contribution to his and Crick's achievement. All of the work of Watson and Crick stems from Rosalind Franklin's x-ray pictures and it is now generally conceded that their Nobel Prize would not have been achieved had they not stolen data from Rosalind Franklin.