Where is the enthusiasm, the chaos, in this brave new world of blinking technology and oiled abdominals? The answer is that you have to dig a little. But it adds its own unique contemporary hybrid in the music it favours: country and western, mixed with dance tracks. "I've always loved country and I want to show that it isn't a dead music form," says Tim Perry, co-founder of Twisted with Piers Hawkins. For instance, at a back bar in Brixton, Twisted club heralds a return to the spilt beer and out- by-midnight approach to nightlife that ruled in the Seventies and early Eighties. OVER THE past few years, club life has become a bit corporate, with VIP rooms, sponsors and in-it-for-the-dough promoters and DJs. Rosalind Franklin, the Dark Lady of DNA, may have many reincarnations.'On Giants' Shoulders', Melvyn Bragg's study of the personalities and work of 12 prominent scientists, from Archimedes to Crick and Watson, is published by Hodder & Stoughton, pounds 12.99.James Watson and Francis Crick, who, with Maurice Wilkins, won the Nobel Prize for DNA work. In a way, her rigour of mind was her worst enemy because she refused to accept the simpler helical explanation until it was too late. But, with devastating irony, it was evidence she herself produced which proved the vital clue for the final model built by Crick and Watson.Her spirit will not rest; she raises too many problems and questions.

The place of women at that time in a scientific workforce, the interaction of character and research, and of personality on the politics of the scientific process - inflexibility and obsession versus adaptability and a more objective pattern of thought. It was found later in her notebooks, but it had formed part of the discussion. There is always give and take in science, but in Franklin's case it appears to be that it was always her information, freely given, which helped others There is little evidence of others helping her. She went on to become a good friend of Francis Crick and his family in the few years before her death, at the age of 37, from ovarian cancer.In Lewis Wolpert's radio programme, Maurice Wilkins says one reason she was not acknowledged properly at the time was that they did not know what she had done. To me there wasn't anything else." This fits in with what Professor Evelyn Fox Keller at MIT told me when I interviewed her for On Giants' Shoulders. She is a great admirer of Franklin, whom she sees as "a kind of heroic scientist She really believed in doing the work for its own sake. It is a tragedy that she lost out on the official history of the subject." But she agrees with Watson that it was the others that carried the day.Crick and Watson were impressed by Franklin's generosity when she saw they had solved the great problem.

He points out that not only did she isolate herself from Maurice Wilkins, but she didn't befriend any of the other 14 women working at King's either: "I think she chiefly suffered from an unbending personality which could not make friends easily," he says.James Watson's most emphatic reason for her failure to get there first was, he told me, that: "She didn't live DNA In fact, she was prepared to stop working on it She should have stuck with DNA She probably didn't think DNA all the time the way I did. He maintains that she did not get on well with most people who worked around her. "You've got to know the other people," James Watson told me when I talked to him for On Giants' Shoulders "You better know what those arguments are against you. It's hard to be successful in science unless you talk to your opponents."Or was it just that she was a loner? Watson's explanation for her lack of contact with others is less to do with laboratory politics and the customs of academic life than with the character of Franklin herself. I mean the way she was not even allowed to go into the Common Room in her own institution, and could not talk shop with colleagues."It was this isolation that meant her contribution could not be parleyed into something bigger. Conversation with colleagues is essential to working out scientific problems, and Rosalind Franklin was not included in the conversations. When I talked to Richard Dawkins, he recalled the anti-female academic world of the Fifties, and put his finger on what could be a central element in the plot: "I suppose the worst of it is the way the scientific society treated Rosalind Franklin I do not mean the way that Watson and Crick treated her.