Alice Kober: The Dark Lady of Linear B ?


Anyone who has read James Watson's The Double Helix only remembers Rosalind Franklin as this cantakerous scientist who once almost physically intimidated Watson. So when Brenda Maddox's The Dark Lady of DNA came out, it was a revelation to read about her side of the story. I had heard earlier about how she was not given her due for the role she played in determining the double helix structure of DNA. But Maddox's book was a clearly presented argument of just how much her contribution was. Women in science (or for that matter, most professional fields) had always faced an uphill battle to prove themselves to their male peers - or to have the true worth of their contributions recognised. And in the case of Rosalind Franklin, to add insult to injury, her premature death meant that she was airbrushed out of most accounts of the double-helix discovery even though her crystallographic images provided some of the most vital clues about the actual structure.

And now it seems that there was another contemporaneous "dark lady" (as Maddox referred to Franklin in the title of her book) whose life has an almost uncanny parallel to that of Franklin. It is often mentioned that the decipherment of Linear B was one of the three great human achievements announced in 1952 (the other two being the double-helix structure of DNA and the ascent of Mount Everest). Linear B is one of the three scripts that was used to write the inscriptions found through archaeological excavations in Knossos, Crete by Sir Arthur Evans in the early 20th century. Evans' blind belief that the script was used to write an yet unknown Minoan language held up its decipherment until the 1950s, when Michael Ventris (who was an architect by profession), working in collaboration with John Chadwick (a classicist), finally cracked the script on realizing that the underlying language was Greek. The story of how Ventris did this is enthralling and is set about in detail in Chadwick's book The Decipherment of Linear B. Ventris died young, in a motor accident at the age of 34 (very soon after announcing the decipherment), and Chadwick's book is written as a homage to his collaborator. Actually, Ventris' life is no less intriguing - and he has only recently been the subject of a biography by Andrew Robinson The Man who Deciphered Linear B. However - and this is where the connection to Rosalind Franklin comes in - there is little mention in Chadwick of Alice Kober's contribution. Alice Kober was an American classicist and archaeologist who was a faculty member of Brooklyn College. In the 1940s she went to Oxford to work as an assistant of John Myers. By all recent accounts, the work that she did there was fundamental towards the eventual breakthrough in deciphering Linear B. Presumably it was only her premature death through cancer (possibly caused by her chain smoking habits) that prevented Kober from being more closely associated with the credit for deciphering Linear B. It is only recently, when scholars are at last going through her archived papers, that the true magnitude of her achievement is becoming apparent. Reading what little is available in terms of biographical information in the web (see below for a couple of links) it is impossible not to marvel at the close parallels between Rosalind Franklin and Alice Kober (in fact, one of the articles linked below explicitly mentions it).
Women in Old World Archaeology: Alice Kober
Archives revive interest in forgotten life
But more importantly, it seems to me that there is a great story waiting to be told here - the life story of Alice Kober. Not to take anything away from the achievement of Ventris about whose genius there is no doubt, the detailed account of how Alice Kober came so close but was tragically denied the crowning glory by death is bound to be fascinating. Brenda Maddox, are you listening ?