Rosalind Franklin (26 page)

 

Crick was not being ingenuous in his letter to Rosalind. The questions he posed were still open. The letter to
Nature
of 25 April 1953, a turning point in scientific history, had not struck scientists of the time like a thunderclap from heaven. Their awakening to its importance was very gradual. Many did not believe it for years, Erwin Chargaff remaining a conspicuous and sarcastic hold-out. Other scientists recall their initial scepticism.

At the Institut Pasteur in Paris, François Jacob recalled, the Watson-Crick article ‘had not electrified me or anyone else in the laboratory. The crystallographic argument went over my head.'

When Gunther Stent, at the Virus Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, heard the news from Max Delbrück in March 1953, he ran to tell his colleagues that there had been a fabulous breakthrough. They weren't interested. ‘Look at Pauling!' was their reaction. ‘It'll be just a few weeks until some biochemist is going to show that the Watson-Crick structure is baloney as well.' But Pauling was not quick to admit his ideas were ‘baloney' and continued, even after he read the Watson-Crick paper, to believe that his own three-chain structure had merit.

Crick himself much later recalled that he had certainly believed their structure was:

 

along the right lines (though Jim had occasional doubts), but the experimental evidence, though supporting the model, was at that time not enough to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. Strictly speaking, our model was not finally
decisively
proved till some
25
or so years later, when the crystal structure of short lengths of DNA of defined sequences was solved by the isomorphous replacement method.

 

What remained to be discovered was how the double helix came apart. The two chains could not copy themselves without unwinding, but no one knew how it was done. In July 1953 the Royal Society's summer
conversazione
included among its exhibits a model and presentation entitled ‘A proposed structure for DNA', which identified seven scientists as contributors: Watson, Crick, Wilkins, Franklin, Wilson, Stokes and Gosling. Gosling was guarding the model when along came the eminent J.B.S. Haldane, ‘puffing on this foul Woodbine, and he looked at it for a long time, and then he said: ‘‘So what you want is an un-twiddle-ase''.' (In biochemistry, ‘—ase' is the suffix meaning an enzyme.)

The importance of the discovery, however, was recognised at Cold Spring Harbor where Watson turned up at a symposium in June 1953. The triumph was celebrated in the inevitable show, in a ditty for two voices, one announcing ‘I'm Watson', the other, ‘I'm Krick':

 

Let us show you our trick —
We have found where the seed of life sprang from.
We believe we're a stew
Of molecular goo
With a period of 34 Angstrom.

 

Another verse hit at the well-known girl-watching proclivities of the intrepid pair:

 

So just think what this means

To our respective genes —

That sex need not be disgusting;

All you girls try the trick

Of Watson and Krick

And achieve double helical lusting.

 

A Radcliffe student, waiting on tables at the symposium, fed up with the flirtatious banter, said she had named her two cats Watson and Crick. ‘And,' she added darkly, ‘they're neutered.'

So slow was the double helix news to travel that when in the summer of 1953 Bernal introduced Rosalind to Sven Furberg, whose pioneering work at Birkbeck in 1949 was cited in the Watson-Crick paper, Furberg was surprised to find a copy of his thesis on Rosalind's desk. She asked him whether he believed the Watson-Crick proposal that the DNA molecule was a helix.
Believe
it? He had not even read it. (Bernal later reproached himself for the road not taken and thought if Birkbeck had pursued Furberg's work, there might have been an ‘almost simultaneous discovery'.)

 

Waiting for the apparatus in order to get down to serious work on the tobacco virus, Rosalind had time for a prolonged holiday. Like her Aunt Mamie Bentwich, Rosalind had always been sceptical about the Zionist dream of a national homeland for the Jews. Now that the dream had been realised and Israel was a five-year-old independent state, she decided to go and take a look.

Boarding the ‘Tauern Express' at Victoria Station, with Anne Piper as company as far as Greece, she headed first for Ljubljana where she was received once more with great warmth. A scientific colleague said to Anne about Rosalind, ‘She makes my clock tick.' Anne returned to England from Greece and Rosalind got a boat to Haifa from Piraeus.

At Haifa she was met by relatives and friends, who included her cousin Irene Neuner, her wartime housemate in Putney. They organised for Rosalind to be taken by taxi to Jerusalem where she toured ten synagogues and witnessed tight orthodox communities. Her ambivalence about Jews was stirred. She wrote her parents, who, she knew, would understand:

 

I find it hard to see what can be the common factor in anti-semitism which is directed both against the ghetto Jews and the successful assimilated or near-assimilated Jews — so different that I find it hard to remember that what I saw last night was the way the majority of Jews lived in Poland and other East European countries right up to the last war.

I find it repulsive that the young should be made equally grotesque, and deliberately isolated from anything resembling a broader life and forbidden any of the normal subjects in school . . . I'm told that these young — who finally get away — frequently are fantastically anti-religious or communist.

 

She had no such doubts about the Weizmann Institute of Science at Rehovoth. Her second cousin David Samuel, grandson of Herbert Samuel, was working there: another scientist in the family. She found the research excellent and the climate wonderful. She might, she told her mother, ‘be tempted to seek work there: but the community was too small and isolated — all 28 and 35 and having babies at the same time . . .'

As she went about the country, however, the sight of kibbutz life disturbed her deeply. Identifying, as so often, with the children, she wrote home:

 

I can sympathise with the desire of somebody whose intellectual background is fully developed to go off to the country and let their intellect thrive on more rudimentary things (though I should never want to do it myself) but for children who have never been elsewhere or even seen town life — it can't mean the same thing.

 

Determined to see as much of the country as she could, she hitchhiked to remote spots — something her cousin Irene felt was a very risky thing for a young woman to do. At some point a lorry driver who gave her a lift tried to rape her. Her cousin later commented ‘I think it shook even her'; but Rosalind was undeterred.

She went to the southernmost tip of Israel, to Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba; the town then barely existed — it was just a handful of huts and a wind pump. She also made her way to Sodom on the Dead Sea. More difficulties appeared.

 

The only ‘restaurant' was a large cave by the Dead Sea [run by a] man who sold bottled drinks ... I was escorted to the cave by some French-speaking Moroccans and ate sardines and drank orange juice. There seemed to be no option but to spend the night in the cave, but a party of tourists arrived and took me back to Bersheba —
6
men from
4
different countries.

 

Only towards the end of her stay did Rosalind visit Tel Aviv. Perhaps it was just as well. Her disapproval of Jews who fulfilled the stereotype flooded over her, as she explained to her parents:

 

I had been more than adequately warned about the people, who disgusted me far more than the architecture. I'm afraid German Jews in Tel Aviv make just the same impression on one as Germans in Germany, typified by the hotel keeper: ‘Mein Gott, warum you don't speak Deutsch.' They all cheat you as badly as orientals — and one minds it more ... In fact, Tel Aviv would make anyone anti-semitic.

 

Back in Haifa, relating her experiences to Irene, Rosalind told about her near-rape. Her cousin privately thought, with the sarcasm of a relative, ‘Ros wouldn't know what being raped was.'

Irene knew Rosalind well enough to ask her directly what no one else dared: why had she never married? Rosalind gave a straight answer: all the men she had ever liked were always already married. Irene silently reasoned that Rosalind was not the type for breaking up a marriage.

None of the awkward moments was relayed to her mother, for whom Rosalind summed up the holiday, in her last air letter on 9 September: as ‘wonderful . . . amazing, varied'. Back at Birkbeck, over cucumber sandwiches, she gave a talk to the Fabian Society at which she described her trip to Israel, particularly the kibbutzim and the research she had seen at the Weizmann Institute. Bernal was so impressed that he took steps to have a visa for Israel put in his passport, while Wolfie Traub, a member of the Birkbeck crystallography group, was so intrigued that he joined the Weizmann Institute a few years later and spent most of his scientific career in Israel.

 

Her intended work on the tobacco mosaic virus was still being held up. Bernal, trying to lessen the delay, asked Randall if they might borrow from King's ‘one of the cameras designed by Miss Franklin for the study of X-ray diffraction by solution'. Randall's reply was true to form: ‘We do in fact intend to use this equipment very shortly and I shall have to make careful enquiries before I can give a definite answer one way or the other . . .'

At last, by December, Rosalind had redirected, without apparent regret, her scientific curiosity and ingenuity to the tobacco mosaic virus, known from the curling, brittleness and mottled patches of light and dark green (hence ‘mosaic') that it causes on tobacco leaves. To Rosalind TMV was just as exciting as DNA.

Viruses are large particles made up of inert large molecules composed of proteins and either RNA or DNA. They come to life when they enter a living cell and parasitically take over the reproductive mechanism of the cell and duplicate themselves rapidly, with consequences well-known as ‘getting a virus'.

Research on TMV was not motivated by a desire to assist the then-respected tobacco industry, but rather by a wish to understand the way it infects — injecting itself like a syringe into the host cell. TMV virtually launched the science of virology in 1886; it was simple, stable, available and highly infectious — a model for the study of viruses in general. Before the war Bernal at Cambridge, with his colleague Fankuchen, had put TMV under X-ray diffraction analysis. Together — known as ‘Sage' and ‘Fan' — they produced a classic paper in 1941, showing that the virus was composed of identical subunits of protein; how these fit together was anybody's guess. Watson got the answer in 1952 by photographing a tilted sample held before the X-ray camera. This exercise was very far from his expertise, yet he succeeded in establishing that the matching subunits spiralled round in a helix. This accomplished, Watson gave up the work, concluding that ‘the way to DNA was not through TMV'. For Rosalind, on the other hand, TMV was the way out of DNA. Rosalind built on Watson's work, correcting it with the help of her X-ray photographs, better ones than, as with DNA, anyone had got before.

What TMV (tobacco mosaic virus) does to tobacco leaves.

 

In her attic office, with her North American Phillips camera five floors below in the leaking basement, she set out to determine the internal structure of the helical array, using the techniques in which she was singularly adept. She wrote to Dr A. Lindo Patterson in Pennsylvania to tell him, what others in the field already knew, that TMV was going to be harder to solve than DNA: ‘Here the fibre-diagram is considerably more complicated than that of DNA, but judging by previous work (I've only just taken it up myself) it is not possible to index the reflections . . .'

The questions to answer were: did the nucleic acid, the RNA, stand in the centre, like the wick in a candle? Or was it tucked into cosy corners between the subunits?

 

The momentous year of 1953 ended with a healing visit to Nannie at Church Stretton and to the Luzzatis in Strasbourg. Denise and Vittorio, after a year at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, had returned to France, both for posts at the Centre des Recherches sur les Macromolecules in Strasbourg. Rosalind summed up the year in a Christmas letter to Anne and David Sayre in Philadelphia:

 

For myself, Birkbeck is an improvement on King's, as it couldn't fail to be. But the disadvantages of Bernal's group are obvious — a lot of narrow-mindedness, and obstruction directed especially at those who are not Party members. It's been very slow starting up there, but I still think it might work out all right in the end. I'm starting X-ray work on viruses (the old TMV to begin with) and I'm also to have somebody paid by the Coal Board to work under me on coal problems — more or less the continuation of what I was doing in Paris. But so far I've failed to find a suitable person for the job . . .