Rosalind Franklin (19 page)

Girls, for Watson, were equal to genes as objects of supreme curiosity. He appraised her against his standard of feminine beauty — Hedy Lamarr, the French ‘popsies' studying English at Cambridge language schools, and his sister Elizabeth — and found her wanting. As he recorded in
The Double Helix,
in a sentence that has since become notorious: ‘Momentarily I wondered how she would look if she took off her glasses and did something novel with her hair.'

Believing that young women should add sparkle to life, Watson did not think much of Rosalind's dress sense either:

Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while [he added ungrammatically] at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents.

Watson had no idea of Rosalind's scientific reputation, let alone her background. An acute observer of physical detail but a poor psychologist, he assessed her as the ‘product of a mother whose own career aspirations had been thwarted' and who ‘duly stressed the desirability of professional careers that could save bright girls from marriages to dull men'.

The very opposite was true. Rosalind had made herself into the antithesis of her mother. The last thing that Muriel Franklin wanted, for herself or her daughter, was a career, and, being married to a man she found the most fascinating in the world, she was incapable of imagining the plight of a woman chained to a bore.

Thus preoccupied, Watson did not grasp what Rosalind said about the water cloaking the phosphates on the outside of the molecule. He took no notes. He never did.

One week later he and Crick had put together a model of their own. Using leftover parts from a previous Cavendish attempt at a different exercise and — not to be overlooked — their long hours of theorising about helical diffraction and folding polypeptide chains, they assembled a structure based on what Watson had half-gleaned from King's and from what Maurice had told Francis from memory earlier that month. Their operating principle was clear, and it was the opposite of Rosalind's: to incorporate the minimum number of experimental facts.

Their model was largely posited on their own understanding of the stereochemical requirements of the model and on Watson's memory of King's research data. That their immediate inspiration was Rosalind's talk was made perfectly clear in a written summary of their approach to the model: ‘Stimulated by the results presented by the workers at King's College, London, at a colloquium given on 21st November, 1951, we have attempted to see if we can find any general principles on which the structure of DNA might be based.' Their handiwork resulted in a three-chain model of a helix with the phosphates on the inside, bases on the outside, sticking out. John Kendrew insisted that out of courtesy, the King's team — Wilkins, Franklin, Seeds, Gosling and Fraser — should be invited up to see what the Cavendish pair had done.

The gross miscalculation was obvious. Rosalind wasted no time on pleasantries. Where was the water? She pointed out that DNA is a thirsty molecule — soaking up water more than ten times what they had allowed. The phosphates had to be on the outside, encased in a shell of water. If the molecule were as Watson and Crick suggested, how could it hold together? The sodium ions that they had erroneously positioned on the outside would be encased in sheaths of water and thus unavailable for binding.

Rosalind was polite enough as she spoke — according to Seeds (although Watson later described her as ‘pugnaciously assertive'). On the train home, however, with Wilkins and Seeds, she was jubilant. She had not expected the model to be right. The whole approach was unprofessional. The way to proceed was not to make a hypothesis until the experimental facts were in hand, then not to publish any results until the facts were absolutely certain. However, Gosling surmised she had learned something and that now she was a little bit worried about how much one ought to talk about what one was doing.

Crick later took the blame on himself. The model was completely wrong because ‘in fact there was a lot of water there. I did not know enough chemistry to know that things like sodium are highly likely to be hydrated anyway.'

As a result of their fiasco, Bragg ordered Watson and Crick to a halt. He and Randall, after a quiet word, agreed that investigating the structure of DNA would be left to King's. (This pact, to various American accounts, manifested a very English sense of gentlemanly fair play. This interpretation ignores the fact that in post-war Britain queuing and sharing had become part of the national genius and that, with both laboratories supported by the same funding council, the MRC, it seemed to both sides almost criminally wasteful to duplicate research.) In any event, as a testament to their assent to the agreement, Crick and Watson sent their jigs — their bits of metal and wire — down to King's.

Every Christmas before the college closed for the holiday, King's Physics and Biophysics Unit held its annual dinner. This was another of Randall's command performances. Its highlight was a rollicking pantomime at which few were spared, least of all ‘JT' himself. By all accounts, the 1951 entertainment was unusually lively, so much so that the devout Professor Coulson complained to Randall that the highjinks had overstepped the mark. Some women wore balloons inside their blouses. Condoms were inflated and released in the Strand. Music was performed on a piano hijacked from the theology department.

The central sketch portrayed a PhD candidate, played by Derek Mould, undergoing his viva examination. Bill Seeds was the external examiner just arrived from Ireland by donkey, and Stan Bayley was Randall, with bald-pate wig, glasses, pipe, linen jacket and bow tie. On the desk was the tatty rubber plant that was Randall's pride and joy.

The scientist-at-play lyric is a demanding form. Abstruse technical terms must be woven with gibes at laboratory personalities in verses with a strong beat and a repetitive chorus. The creative brains of King's Physics and Biophysics were well up to the challenge:

Alex Stokes had an equation — For the tracks at every station,
And the lines at Clapham Junction — Were a complex Bessel function!
Now the boss's name is Randall — He's the guy who turns the handle,
And we sin and slave and
MURDER
— Just to spread his empire further!

Chorus:
Have you ever seen —
Have you ever seen,
Such a funny lab before.

Rosalind had never seen such a funny lab before, and she was determined to get out of this one as soon as possible. Over the holiday break she set out for Paris to try to get her old job back.

ELEVEN
The Undeclared Race

(January 1952-January 1953)

B
ACK IN HER BELOVED
P
ARIS
, Rosalind brought her photographs with their many reflections to show Vittorio Luzzati. He suggested that she apply a technique called Patterson function analysis to interpret them. ‘It's what a crystallographer would do,' he told her, seeing her as a physical chemist seeking guidance.

Jacques Mering, however, was unpleasant. She had left his lab and that was that. Once more he refused to lend his name to the papers she was writing based on the results they had achieved together. Adrienne Weill was well aware of Rosalind's feelings for Mering, which she saw as deep, genuine and somewhat tragic.

Back in London empty-handed, Rosalind took a bold step. She went to see J.D. Bernal at Birkbeck College and asked to join his biological group. To her relief, the great man welcomed the idea - in principle. She dared not press further to ask if she might move to Birkbeck that very year. There was no alternative but to return to King's College London, concealing that defection was in her mind.

She announced to Gosling that they would apply the Patterson procedures to measure the reflections of DNA's A form that they would get once their designed tilting camera was ready. It would allow them to photograph the fibre from a great many angles. They were following Luzzati's advice, to be sure, but it was advice Rosalind was very willing to take, for it was what she would have wanted to do anyway. The deductive approach was what Bernal had recommended in Stockholm (where she had noted ‘Real test requires scattering out in crystal diagrams and final structure by Patterson sections'). There was nothing wrong about the method except its difficulty and inherent limitations. Crystallographers long after the event agreed it was perfectly reasonable for Rosalind and Gosling to proceed in this manner.

‘The Patterson' was named after A. Lindo Patterson, a New Zealander educated at McGill University in Montreal, who in the 1920s had developed the method for circumventing the difficult ‘phase' problem of measuring X-rays' peaks and troughs. It relies only on the intensities — the blackness — of the spots captured on a photographic plate. A Patterson map, which looks like a contour map, is a complicated overlay of mathematical pictures showing the heavier atoms, such as phosphorus, standing out as peaks. It makes it possible to estimate the distances between these atoms. By methodically registering the intensities (or blackness) of the spots in the X-ray diffraction picture, with luck, glimpses of the internal configuration of the molecule may slowly emerge. Carolyn Cohen, a protein crystallographer, thinks of it as ‘the structure speaking to you through those spots'. The distinguished crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin of Oxford, Bernal's collaborator, a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1947, was considered ‘the queen of the Patterson function'. David Sayre, who had worked with Hodgkin, said, ‘That was her tool and she was unbelievable at it . . . She thought in terms of maps.'

The work suited Rosalind's mathematical brain. It required intense concentration during long hours of laborious calculation — what is now done in a flash by computer. She and Gosling, having determined the intensities of the spots, then entered into a calculating machine the numerical equivalent of the sequence in which the spots should occur, obtained from numbered strips of cardboard named after their inventors, Arnold Beevers and Henry Lipson. Gosling had nightmares that the handsome mahogany box of sequentially numbered Beevers—Lipson strips would drop to the floor and they would have to reassemble them.

Rosalind felt that if she and Gosling measured all the vectors (directions) between the atoms in the various diffraction patterns they obtained from the A form of DNA, the data would tell them about the three-dimensional configuration of the molecule. ‘That is what she felt she was there to do, rather than speculative model building,' Gosling later explained.

Rosalind had not done Patterson calculations before. What's more, no one had ever attempted ‘cylindrical sections' — an order of magnitude more difficult, like trying to do a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. The difficulty did not daunt her.

 

Her other task early in 1952 was to write an account of her previous year's work for the Turner and Newall Fellowship. In a detailed report, dated 7 February, she said she had spent the first eight months assembling the necessary apparatus and then moved on to undertake ‘a systematic X-ray investigation of the fine fibres of desoxyribose nucleic acid obtained by M.H.F. Wilkins from the specimen prepared by Professor Signer (Berne)'. She then gave the dimensions of the unit cell of the molecule. (The unit cell is to the crystal what a brick is to a wall: the basic, repeating, building block.) She indexed the unit cell tentatively, according to the
International Tables of Crystallography
as ‘face-centred monoclinic'. The DNA molecule, she said, had its phosphates on the outside, and changed from the crystalline to the paracrystalline (that is, the ‘wet', or gelatinous) state upon hydration, with a corresponding change in the length of the fibres. The results, in sum, suggested ‘a helical structure (which must be very closely packed) containing probably 2, 3 or 4 co-axial nucleic acid chains per helical unit, with the phosphate groups near the outside'.

The report was a succinct summary of an impressive year's work.

 

Other events in February 1952 included the death of King George VI in his sleep after a long illness widely reported abroad but hushed up in the British press, and the refusal by the US State Department of a passport to Linus Pauling. Under the McCarthy era's McCarran Act, travel abroad was forbidden for Americans with suspect political sympathies. Pauling's active opposition to the Cold War, nuclear weapons and the development of the hydrogen bomb was a prime example. Of narrower interest was
Acta Crystallographica'
s receipt on 16 February of a paper by W. Cochran, F.H.C. Crick, and V. Vand offering a mathematical prediction of the pattern that atoms arranged in a helix would form when diffracted by X-rays. The authors acknowledged that the same theory ‘was also derived independently and simultaneously by Dr. A.R. Stokes' — information they attributed to ‘private communication'. (Stokes, still reluctant to publish his own helical work done at King's, declined to be cited more directly in their paper.) Helices were indeed, as Crick had commented about this stage, ‘in the air'.

What is it that makes one's home country seem so awful after returning from living in a foreign country one has come to love?

 

Throwing this bitter question to Anne Sayre, Rosalind showed clearly that part of her aversion to King's was an aversion to home. She spelled it out in a letter of devastating candour to the Sayres:

What you feel about America is exactly what I feel about England ... To put it at its lowest, I suspect that I enjoyed being a more interesting person in France than I am in England — more interesting simply because English scientists are rarer in France than in England.

At King's, Rosalind acknowledged, her equipment and facilities were good — ‘in fact scandalously good, considering the shortage of money generally for such things'. But (as she had told Adrienne Weill the previous October), ‘I still want to get out as soon as I can.' There followed some very harsh words about her colleagues:

The very young are mostly thoroughly nice but none of them brilliant. There are one or two more serious people who are good and pleasant, but refrain from doing research so as to be able to keep outside the unpleasant atmosphere. And the other middle and senior people are positively repulsive, and it's they who set the general tone. I've got myself organised so that I hardly ever see any of them, which makes things better but distinctly boring. The other serious trouble is that there isn't a first-class or even a good brain among them — in fact nobody with whom I particularly want to discuss anything, scientific or otherwise, and I so much prefer to work under somebody who commands my respect and can offer some encouragement.

To the Sayres, she confided the news that Bernal had welcomed her application to join his department. Birkbeck would suit her better, she thought; as an evening college, unlike the rest within the University of London, it took only part-time students who must be people who really wanted to learn. Then, in a rare and explicit reference to her Jewishness, Rosalind added:

 

And they seem to collect a large proportion of foreigners on the staff, which is a good sign. King's has neither foreigners nor Jews.

 

Rosalind had a tendency, as her sister Jenifer recognised, of ‘retreating into a disconcerting silence or obvious disapproval if she felt out of tune with her surroundings'. At King's Rosalind felt out of tune to such an extent that she misinterpreted the facts. Simon Altmann and Louise Heller, to name but two, were both Jewish and foreign. Attempting to list others would be invidious. Jack Lowy, a Czech; Stephen Pelc, the Austrian Marianne Friedlander? No one was counting, or even speculating as Rosalind clearly had done, whether a surname indicated Jewishness. There were many at King's who did not realise that she was Jewish. However, King's seems to have touched that nerve in her alert to even a hint of anti-semitism. In Paris she had been surrounded by people generally known to be Jewish; anybody who had survived the Nazi occcupation was not inclined to keep the fact quiet. At King's when Rosalind did not see Jews in the significant figures around her — Randall, Wilkins, Coulson — she wrongly registered them as totally absent. In many ways, her demeanour at King's fits the description of the twelfth-century English Jews of Scott's
Ivanhoe:
‘watchful, suspicious and timid — yet obstinate, uncomplying, and skilful in evading the dangers to which they were exposed'.

 

Why not come to the United States? Anne Sayre countered. David, her husband, could organise finance for a period of work, and the eponymous Patterson was in Philadelphia (at the Fox Chase Cancer Center), with ‘stacks' of equipment which he would lend cheerfully. ‘My own anti-Bernal feelings', Anne confessed, ‘are passionate', and she warned Rosalind that his staff rarely saw him. (Bernal, a zealous Communist, travelled widely and was heavily involved in international peace and Eastern European scientific organisations.) Whatever Rosalind decided, her good friend concluded, ‘if you murder anyone at King's, I will fly over as a character witness and swear it was justifiable homicide'.

Bernal's politics did not concern Rosalind at all. ‘Whatever one may have against the man, he's
brilliant,'
she said. That was the kind of man she wanted to work with.

 

Rosalind's unhappiness at King's left a legacy of sour memories of an unhappy young woman going about with a ‘face like a thundercloud' and who at best looked sad. They speculated on the cause of her unhappiness. Was it some emotional attachment in Paris that had gone wrong? At worst, she grew angry and displayed the rage the French shopkeeper must have seen: eyes blazing, words pouring out. Geoffrey Brown, a research student in the physics department, had an altercation with Rosalind over a Tesla coil (for detecting leaks in vacuum systems). She asked to borrow the one he had been allocated by the physics department. When she did not return it upon his request, ‘I went and took it back, and screwed it onto the wall. And she came in, pulled it off and walked straight out.' He did not try again. She was senior to a mere graduate student.

Another doctoral student, John Cadogan (later Sir John), recalled working late in the physics laboratory one Saturday night; it was the only time he could get at the infrared spectrometer; his own chemistry department didn't have one. Suddenly the door opened and he found himself facing a livid Rosalind: ‘She nearly scared the living daylights out of me. She demanded to know what I was doing there at that time of night. She threatened to call security.' When Cadogan identified himself, she calmed down, whereupon a familiar pattern asserted itself: ‘She became very kind and warmed to me, interested in the work of a young researcher and explained to me much over the coming months about the progress of the DNA work.'

There is little doubt that these ugly incidents occurred, nor that the male consensus in the lab was that most objectionable of male compliments: ‘She looked beautiful when she was angry.' All such anecdotes are one-sided and tainted by hindsight. Unfortunately, Rosalind's side of these encounters was never recorded.

Maurice Wilkins bore the brunt of her antagonism but felt he was getting used to it. He wrote to Francis Crick in the spring of 1952, ‘Franklin barks often but doesn't succeed in biting me. Since I reorganised my time so that I can concentrate on the job, she no longer gets under my skin. I was in a bad way about it all when I last saw you.'

When Rosalind told Anne Sayre about the ‘one or two more serious people who are good and pleasant but refrain from doing research so as to be able to keep outside the unpleasant atmosphere', she clearly meant Alec Stokes. Stokes, in fact, much preferred theory to fumbling with cameras and messy gels. In any event, he got on well with Rosalind and invited her in 1952 to give five lectures on crystallography. Her thick sheaf of notes shows that she took a lot of trouble to explain the basics of X-ray diffraction to honours students studying for the bachelor of science degree.

That spring saw the successful completion of the tilting camera that she and Gosling had designed. All labs at that time were very reliant on their workshops, as so much had to be made by hand. King's prided itself on an excellent shop, which had managed to fashion parts out of army surplus equipment ‘liberated' from German laboratories, such as a damaged Siemens electron microscope. A King's technician was startled one night to see Rosalind whirl in, in evening dress, almost unrecognisable from her daytime persona. A swift adjustment to some detail and she was gone. He felt he had been visited by a creature from another planet.