Rosalind Franklin (16 page)

Rosalind served her London friends unaccustomed foods such as pigeon, rabbit and artichokes. She also instructed them in the arts of the French kitchen. How to tell whether a Camembert is ripe? Press one finger on the cheese and the other to the closed eyelid; if the consistency matches, the cheese is ready. Potatoes taste better cooked without water. Put them in butter in a heavy pan, cover and cook them in their own juices. She adored putting garlic in things, especially when her father came to dinner. Ellis Franklin who always insisted he hated it never recognised it in his favourite dish, roast beef.

Those lucky enough to be invited for a meal met the other Rosalind: not the one from the lab where she was ‘someone who kept to herself' and who never smiled, but rather the amusing conversationalist and attentive hostess. Not so much Jekyll and Hyde as
sol y sombra.
To an extraordinary degree Rosalind compartmentalised parts of herself. Those who saw one side rarely saw the other.

Her guests often included members of her family, such as her aunt Alice Franklin who lived nearby at Elm Park Gardens and to whom Rosalind was close — perhaps, her cousin Ursula thought, because Alice did not get on with Ellis. ‘Is it your turn or mine to be favourite niece this week?' she would ask Ursula. The Altmanns were frequent guests; younger members of the biophysics unit were also favoured with a meal: Louise Heller and her husband, Raymond Gosling, and Freda Ticehurst who could see Gosling's awkward position, caught between Rosalind and Wilkins.

Of all the ‘what might have beens' surrounding the quest for the structure of DNA, Rosalind's failure to invite Maurice Wilkins to dinner at her flat deserves a high place on the list.

TEN
Such a Funny Lab

(May - December 1951)

W
HEN SPRING COMES
, says Chaucer, ‘Thanne longen folk to goon pilgrimages.' In science these are called conferences. Especially in the early 1950s, with currency restrictions severe and salaries small, the chance to attend, expenses paid, a conference abroad was a conspicuous sign of status and carried a glamour hard to recapture in a jet-weary age. At that time the Medical Research Council's annual report listed the foreign visits made by members of its research establishments during the preceding year as if these were scientific achievements in themselves. In May 1951, Wilkins thus was happy to stand in for Randall at a conference on large molecules being held at the Marine Biological Station in Naples.

At Naples, Wilkins spelled out very plainly for his international audience the reason for the concentration on nucleic acid at King's. When living matter is prepared in crystal form, he said, the arrangement of its molecules can be seen and may lead to an understanding of the structure of the gene. He then put a slide on the screen. No one had ever shown such a sharp discrete set of reflections from the DNA molecule. There was nothing like it in the literature. William Astbury from Leeds, who was in the audience, congratulated Wilkins at the end for this expansion of his own studies. Astbury, an unpersuasive man working at an unfashionable northern university, had not been able to match Randall's post-war knack of attracting government research money.

Also in the audience at Naples was Dr James Watson — the ‘Dr' being particularly remarkable as he was only twenty-three. He had entered the University of Chicago in 1943 at the age of fifteen. When he was seventeen, in the university biology library, he too had read Schro dinger's
What Is Life?,
and changed his own life. He determined to learn what the gene was. Reorienting himself to genetics, he went for his doctoral studies to the University of Indiana; here the Italian microbiologist Salvador Luria brought him into the elite circle under the legendary Max Delbrück to study bacterial viruses. This line of research won Watson a postdoctoral fellowship to Copenhagen to work with the biochemist Herman Kalckar.

As he had heard of neither J.T. Randall nor Maurice Wilkins, young Watson was not disturbed by the common phenomenon of a last-minute replacement for a well-known name on a conference programme. The subject — nucleic acids — was what had drawn him to Naples. He listened eagerly to Wilkins's report that the nucleic acid, DNA, could be prepared in crystal form (as not all large molecules can). Crystalline DNA, as Wilkins was arguing, then could be subjected to X-ray diffraction and thus its three-dimensional structure might be deduced.

Watson believed — with a single-mindedness unavailable to the war-weary heads around him — that the gene was the thing to study. However, he feared that it might be, in his words, ‘fantastically irregular' in shape. The clear pattern of Wilkins's slide demonstrated to him there was a regular structure waiting to be mapped. (Genes should not be equated with DNA; they are
made
of DNA, but not all DNA molecules are genes.) By understanding the structure of the molecule DNA, Watson hoped to understand how the gene did its work of replication.

Watson was a self-propelling young man who had achieved a modicum of adolescent fame on
The Quiz Kids,
a national radio show. His protruding eyes gave the look of being ready to pounce, and he pounced on Wilkins. Very conscious of his own bachelor state, he gathered that Wilkins was an unattached male. When he saw his pretty sister Elizabeth, who had come to Naples with him, eating lunch with Wilkins, Watson formed the thought that he might use his sister as a lure. In his words, ‘if Maurice really liked my sister, it was inevitable that I would become closely associated with his X-ray work on DNA'.

But where would that work go next? In the middle of 1951 Sven Furberg's thesis was being widely read at King's. Rosalind had a photographic copy of the pages describing Furberg's models and the arrangement of DNA's sugars, bases and phosphates (the cluster of chemical groups that together is called a nucleotide). Young Furberg's model for DNA was in the shape of a helix, and demonstrated, in the words of Harry Carlisle, head of crystallography at Birkbeck, ‘that the helix could be a natural structural system for biological macro-molecules'. She was thus acquainted, as were her colleagues, that in the chemical groups inside DNA, the sugars were not parallel to the bases but at right angles to them, but that Astbury had been right in stating that the bases were stacked parallel to each other, 3.4 Ångströms apart.

Furberg, having deposited five copies of his thesis at the University of London Library, returned to Norway, full of admiration for Britain which ‘after having suffered, fought and won the terrible war, felt able to do great things also in peace, to fight and win new battles. Huge social reforms were introduced and their scientists formed ambitious goals, like finding the structures of the fundamental molecules of life.'

This was Randall's philosophy in a nutshell. With the same brilliance with which Britain won the war, the boffins would now solve the mysteries of the living cell.

 

Raymond Gosling, the ‘slave boy', found Rosalind ‘super' to work for. She took great delight in handling her materials. The golden hands had survived the Channel crossing. She began reassembling the X-ray equipment with the Ehrenberg-Spear tube against which a single fibre would be positioned for long hours of X-ray exposure. The procedure, incredibly laborious, now done in seconds by a computer, was not a job for the ham-fisted.

Next she tackled a problem that Wilkins had encountered — making the humidity inside the camera more stable. She knew very well from her French work the importance of keeping specimens moist during the procedure. Working now with a camera with very small volume made this easier. She chose a series of salt solutions through which to bubble hydrogen into the camera at controlled humidities. She first pulled the water out by placing the DNA fibre over a drying agent, then put it back at will by increasing the humidity to a range of different values. It was sometimes possible to use the same fibre several times. Thus she, with Gosling's assistance, demonstrated the easy, reversible hydration of DNA.

Something else Rosalind appeared to have brought from France was an apparent unconcern with the radiation emanating from X-rays. Neither she nor Gosling wore protective lead aprons, even though they worked with the X-ray beam turned on. The camera could only be aligned when the beam was on. Geoffrey Brown, who was working on the separation of nucleic acids by chromatography, came into the basement X-ray room below the level of the Thames, looking for Gosling one night and found Rosalind in semi-darkness working on the X-ray camera. ‘She shouldn't get in the beam,' he thought, and sensed that she was so keen to get the pictures that she was reckless. Louise Heller, too, worried about Rosalind's failure to take proper precautions to save herself from exposure. Even so, Heller, who had worked in health physics at the US atomic energy facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, dared not mention it to a woman who ‘had the sort of drive that the work was more important than anything else'.

(All of these recollections come with the reminder that scientific experiments in the early 1950s were conducted in a laissezfaire atmosphere of unshielded machines and lax safety procedures unthinkable in a later age.)

 

Rosalind's success in using salt solutions to adjust the humidity of the hydrogen-filled camera impressed Wilkins. He had feared the salt might spray the DNA sample. Her technique was the right one. This modest achievement, for her, only increased her scorn for Wilkins. He didn't know simple chemist's techniques of hydrating fibres. Clearly she was not going to have a mentor like Mering, to whom she had just made another genuflection. Her latest paper for
Acta Cryst
on the structure of graphitic carbons thanked ‘Monsieur J. Mering', and him alone, ‘for his continued interest and frequent advice during the course of this work'.

Wilkins sensed that things were going wrong. He asked everybody what he should do to improve relations with Rosalind. At Gosling's suggestion, he bought her chocolates, but these did not help.

The two should have got along well. Wilkins was thirty-five, tall, gauntly handsome with fine features and long straight hair swept back from his broad forehead. He was gentle in manner and attractive to women. Born in New Zealand of Anglo-Irish parents, he had a gift for metaphor befitting a man whose grand-father had taught the poet W.B. Yeats at Dublin High School. He was mathematically fluent and immersed in the very problems that concerned Rosalind. He came from a liberal Unitarian scientific tradition which included a dedication to the higher education of women. (His grandmother had been one of the first students at Newnham, an aunt had helped establish Bedford College, the first British university to grant diplomas to women, and an uncle was memorialised in the Wilkins Prize in Mathematics for women at Trinity College Dublin.) What is more, by curious coincidence, his own first name was taken from the surname of Frederick Denison Maurice, founder of her father's cherished Working Men's College. Politically, he and Rosalind were in tune. The ingredients for many a laboratory romance were there. That was on the one hand.

On the other, Wilkins was Rosalind's temperamental opposite. Her speech came fast, his slow. He evaded gaze and tended to take off his glasses when talking as if he did not wish to see too much, gradually turning away so that the listener was left facing the back of his head. Rosalind fixed her steady eyes like X-rays on the human specimen before her. She positively liked hot and heavy debate and found arguments with French shopkeepers fun. Wilkins, in the face of conflict, became expressionless and quiet.

If Rosalind had wished, she could have twisted Wilkins around her little finger. Many, then and since, have speculated that he was half in love with her. But just emerged from an abruptly broken marriage — his American wife had refused to exchange San Francisco for St Andrews and sought a divorce, cutting him off from his young son — he was emotionally bruised.

This very eligibility may have put Rosalind on edge. She was far more comfortable with men who were married or much younger than herself. But he had the wrong woman. A charm offensive was not in Rosalind's repertoire. Anyway, she could respect only men who were strong and decisive, with something to teach her. Still under the spell of the charismatic Mering, seasoned by long combat with her aggressive father, she looked at her designated collaborator and found him unworthy.

The Maurice Wilkins who inspired affection and admiration in later generations of students at King's was a man much changed by a happy second marriage and warm family life. The earlier Wilkins could give a different impression. A fellow undergraduate at St John's College, Cambridge, remembered him (with some prejudice perhaps as he himself knew Rosalind and had married a friend of hers) as ‘a rather peevish, slightly old-maidy young man . . . none too well off, and with a very large chip on his shoulder — rather a lone wolf . . . and with a passionate interest in optical lenses . . . In many ways, there was much in common with Rosalind but the social backgrounds were so different.'

That seems to have been how he struck Rosalind too. ‘He's so middle-class, Vittorio!' she complained to her old friend when she saw him.

In June it was Rosalind's turn to go on the conference circuit. Well before she left Paris, she had been looking forward to the Second International Conference of Crystallography in Stockholm in June 1951. On the boat over she shared a cabin with the eminent crystallographer, Dorothy Hodgkin FRS, who was violently seasick. Rosalind was not.

Snapshots taken on a day's outing show a happy Rosalind, in her element. Arms crossed, she is wearing a smart shirtwaister dress, trotting down a riverside path in a beautiful European wilderness, in the company of good friends: David and Anne Sayre, Luzzati, and her old flatmate, Philip Hemily were there. (To them she unburdened her troubles, principally that she could not abide Maurice Wilkins.)

It is a conference cliché that the formal sessions are less valuable than the social contacts. At dinner, at coffee breaks, on the inevitable excursion without which, like the group photograph, no conference is complete, and in the bar, scientists tell each other what they are doing — or, according to the microbiologist François Jacob of the Pasteur Institute, ‘at least what one wants to leak out and let people believe one is doing'.

Yet Rosalind filled pages with notes about what she learned relevant to her work. The foremost chemist of the time was there: Linus Pauling from the California Institute of Technology, whose classic
Nature of the Chemical Bond
she had read at Cambridge.

Only that spring Pauling had published news of his triumphant discovery — the alpha helix, the most important regular structure found in proteins, enables its internal chains to turn corners. The best showman in science, Pauling had first revealed his idea in a lecture at Caltech when, building up suspense, he waited until the very end to unveil a construction of coloured plastic balls wired together to form a coiled spiral. This, he announced, was the alpha helix's shape.

The news devastated Lawrence Bragg, now director of the Cavendish. Pauling had been his main rival for twenty-three years (in part because of Bragg's suspicion that his own ideas on the chemical bond had been appropriated and passed off as Pauling's own). Now Pauling had solved the structure of one of protein's basic units — a problem that the Cavendish had had in its sights. Bragg slowly walked up the stairs at the Cavendish, downcast, contemplating what he came to call ‘the biggest mistake of my scientific career'.

In any event, said Francis Crick, now working on protein at the Cavendish and who witnessed the sorry spectacle, ‘Helices were in the air.' Also in the air was the signal that post-war science was becoming competitive, a game of winners and losers.