Anne Sayre (née Colquhoun; April 10, 1923 – March 13, 1998) was an American writer well known for her biography of Rosalind Franklin, one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA.
In 1949, they moved to England as David Sayre was enrolled for a DPhil at the University of Oxford to work under Dorothy Hodgkin (a 1964 Nobel laureate).
In 1975, she revived her ambition to become a lawyer and got enrolled in New York University Law School, from where she graduated with high grades.
They regularly exchanged letters when they lived apart in different continents until the end of 1957, as Franklin developed ovarian cancer.
On October 8, 1957, Franklin wrote to her that she was invited to a phytopathology conference at Bloomington, Indiana, and that she planned to stay with Sayre on her way in New York.
However, her importance surfaced when Watson published his memoir The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA in 1968.
Although the DNA research centred on Franklin, Watson mostly portrayed her as "uninteresting", "belligerent", "sharp, stubborn mind", with her dresses showing "all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents", "the product of an unsatisfied mother", a physical bully, and always referring to her as "Rosy", the name she never appreciated.
[8] She quickly started researching for materials, and after five years, she published Rosalind Franklin and DNA in 1975, which she claimed not as a biography, but as a protest to Watson's.
[10][11] However, Sayre's book has been criticized for its purported attempt to make Franklin as a feminist icon, and wrongly representing sexism of the time.
[12][13] College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Stony Brook University, has Anne Sayre Prize for students.