Rosalind Franklin (31 page)

The ARC grant was at most for three years — that is, until the end of 1957, and every item of new equipment and staff had to be haggled over. Before going on holiday, Rosalind made a list of her requirements: a centrifuge, an X-ray tube, a Geiger counter spectrometer, a biochemist, two research assistants and more working space. She also asked to be upgraded from Senior to Principal Scientific Investigator and to have Dr Klug's future planned for. Klug's Nuffield grant would run out in a year and he had to leave his flat in a few months. He could not move without knowing whether the ARC would allow Rosalind to use its funds to employ him.

The early omens were not good. Jim Watson tried to help by speaking to Lord Rothschild, chairman of the ARC, who lived in Cambridge. ‘I've had a long talk with Victor Rothschild about your ARC grant,' Watson wrote Rosalind. ‘His reaction was very sympathetic, indicating that he would write Slater immediately.' Then Watson added, ‘Perhaps it would be a good idea if we could talk again before anything positive is done so that the mistake of applying for too little could be avoided.'

 

Rosalind was bitter that those like herself who did research fulltime had lower academic rank than those who taught as well. Her salary symbolised her discontent. She was still simmering about having been cut back to £1,080 by the Agricultural Research Council.

In mid-1955, after university salary scales were revised with a view to raising women teachers to parity with men over a period of seven years, Rosalind was entitled to an increase of £150. The college asked that her pay be raised to a total of £1,250. The ARC once again refused, on the grounds of her age.

She was furious. To Bernal, who she knew would understand, she set out her case:

 

My age is
35,
I have been doing full-time research continuously for the past
14
years, and obtained my PhD
10
years ago. I cannot believe that there is any rule which prevents the ARC from paying a salary greater than
£1,080
p.a. to a person of my age and experience. My present salary is less than I should be receiving if I had made a career either in university teaching or in the Scientific Civil Service, and is also less than the
average
received by physicists of my age. In view of the fact that I have no security of employment, and nevertheless hold a position of considerable responsibility, this seems to me entirely unjust.

 

There was unquestionably an element of choice in Rosalind's anomalous position. She did not wish to teach, nor to move to a research institution. But her weakness with the Birkbeck hierarchy reflected Bernal's own. He was at permanent loggerheads with the Master of Birkbeck. To keep his department's science in the top rank, he depended (a bit like John Randall) on scraping up grants from a wide variety of sources, even the Flour Millers' Association. The ARC, moreover, as donor agencies went, was both mean in spirit and unaccustomed to doling out its money to women. The shaving off of the paltry twenty pounds from Rosalind's deserved total was just as insulting as she took it to be. By the end of 1955, the ARC gave it to her, bringing her annual salary to £1,200 — still lower than her entitlement.

Rosalind often presented the face of an embattled woman to the world but she had a great deal to be embattled about. When she went to see Slater at the ARC at the end of September, fortified with Bernal's warm endorsement for her group's rapid progress, she got a stony reception. Slater refused her every single thing she asked for. She needed an X-ray tube? There was one in Sheffield. The only way her work could continue to be financed would be to move it to Cambridge — and only one person could go. Even there, he wanted an absolute halt to the use of virus samples — from Berkeley, Tubingen or anywhere else abroad: he strongly disapproved of what he called ‘second-hand material'. (This ludicrous and provincial diktat was, in its way, as unethical as Randall's telling Rosalind in 1953 to stop thinking about DNA. Science, of all intellectual disciplines, knows no geographical boundaries.)

On her own position, moreover, Slater would not consider raising her to the grade of ‘Principal Scientific Investigator'. When she said she ought to have had that title four years before, he disagreed; to reach that at thirty-one, he said, it would be only for the ‘exceptionally distinguished'. Calling her ‘my dear', he treated her like a little girl and told her that she ought to work under the constant guidance of a biochemist because otherwise she could not hope to understand the biological side of her work.

Rosalind argued back, point by point. Heated rebuttal from a woman was not what Slater welcomed. He refused to discuss Klug's future. He was badly upset by her suggestion that the ARC provide lab space elsewhere in the University of London: that was the university's business. She left in tears, and telephoned Klug in distress from Piccadilly Underground station.

Making careful notes of this bitter meeting in order to represent her requests in writing later in the year, Rosalind commented to herself, ‘Presumably somebody has protested my work with Commoner.' She would not have had to look far for a suspect. Norman Pirie had many reasons to object to her work quite apart from disagreeing with her TMV measurements. Because of his left-wing views, he could not travel to the United States and was cut off from friendly collaboration with American virologists. He had particularly cool relations with one of Rosalind's most helpful contacts, Wendell Stanley of the Virus Laboratory at Berkeley. Stanley, unlike Pirie, had won a Nobel prize for virus research, and had given Rosalind virus samples and was credited in her published papers.

Defiant in the face of Slater's blatant parochialism, Rosalind put in her progress report for the year 1955 that her group was in close touch with the virus-structure studies being carried out ‘in the laboratories of Berkeley (USA) and Tubingen (Germany)' who ‘regularly send us their new preparations for study, and our results are closely interconnected with theirs'. Until her group could make its own preparations, she said, ‘we must remain dependent on the generosity of research workers overseas'.

She stressed that just as important as the new centrifuge
urgently
needed was an agreement to put Dr Klug on the ARC payroll: ‘his position is such that he must make decisions very shortly about other future possibilities. It is therefore important that a decision be made.'

 

Rosalind had tied her future to Aaron Klug's. His friend, the writer Dan Jacobson, observed the relationship. ‘Meeting Rosalind was
crucial
for Aaron,' said Jacobson, who had come to London from South Africa (via Israel) about the same time in the early 1950s. ‘It was the turning point in Aaron's career. He was dissatisfied at Cambridge, could not see the way ahead and admired Bernal despite his politics. And Rosalind was
fascinated
by Aaron. It was a great bond that they were both Jewish — and not the same kind of Jew. They thought the same way — but differently, rather, they understood each other's minds.'

Jacobson, expanding on his theme, said: ‘It is not too strong to say that Rosalind
loved
Aaron. Not in a sexual way. It was a meeting of minds — and of two very different kinds of mind. Aaron was imaginative and playful and artistic as well as a superb scientist. He was an expert on movie Westerns and wrote a skit with me. She scolded Aaron and told him that play-writing was a waste of time for a scientist.'

Part of Rosalind's fascination was for the Klugs' bohemian style of life. Klug felt she was shocked by the way they were living — at the top of a shabby five-storey Victorian house north of Regent's Park, washing up in the kitchen in front of guests, with friends from South Africa staying in the attic. When she was there, she would sit with her straight back on the edge of her chair. She never, as the others did, sat on the floor.

 

Grant worries apart, Rosalind was at the top of her profession and enjoying it. Invitations poured in, and her contacts were wide. She held an impromptu tea party at her flat on the occasion of a conference on semi- and non-crystalline materials held by the Institute of Physics on 18 November 1955. Jacques Mering was there from Paris; also Drago Grdenic from the University of Zagreb (whom she advised to look up her mathematician friend, Simon Altmann, at Oxford) and Alan Mackay, a bright spark from Birkbeck Crystallography.

In 1956 she was off on another round of conferences, none of which slowed the steady flow of papers from her lab in various combinations of authorship — Franklin and Klug, Klug and Holmes, Klug and Finch, Franklin and Holmes, Franklin, Klug and Holmes. Even when in London she strove to keep herself informed as widely as possible. Fred Dainton, her former Cambridge supervisor, was touched when she turned up to his lecture on a subject utterly unrelated to her own research. ‘She seemed to me much more womanly, much less prickly,' he said, even capable of ‘a little gentle teasing'.

At many scientific meetings, it goes without saying, she was the only woman on the programme. Most of the women present were wives, expected to go shopping or sightseeing during the formal sessions and to join the men only for social gatherings. At an important invitation-only conference held by the Ciba Foundation in London in March 1956 on ‘The Biophysics and Biochemistry of Viruses', the printed programme advised: ‘The wives of overseas members (but not those of British members) are invited to join the group for lunch.'

Rosalind stood out on the otherwise all-male select guest list of thirty-four, which included Watson, Crick, Wilkins, Bawden, Pirie, Caspar, Klug, and Robley Williams of the Virus Laboratory at Berkeley. She delivered, on behalf of her co-authors Klug and Holmes, a paper on ‘X-ray Diffraction studies of the Structure and Morphology of Tobacco Mosaic Virus'. Williams, who was at Cambridge on sabbatical, led off the discussion on the question Rosalind's paper had raised: whether there was just one RNA molecule in the TMV virus or many. Watson and Crick came in on Rosalind's side and Pirie threw sharp and witty barbs.

A few weeks later much of the same cast reassembled in Madrid. Until then Rosalind had avoided Spain, out of hostility to Franco, but science overrode politics. With an International Union of Crystallography symposium on ‘Structures on a scale between the atomic and microscopic dimensions', with social receptions in the Plaza de la Villa and the Hotel Wellington, with her name listed once more among the top in the field, and the promise of a week of excursion afterwards, she could hardly wait. She wrote to Adrienne Weill, ‘As I have never been there, I would be happy to go anywhere at all — in the cities, to the seaside, to the caves at Altamira, etc., etc.'

The symposium was a jolly gathering of professional intimates. A photograph shows an assured Rosalind in ideal circumstances, flanked by her three favourite scientists — Crick, Caspar, and Klug — as well as Odile Crick and John Kendrew, in an exciting new foreign venue. When the meeting was over, Rosalind decided to go with Francis and Odile Crick on a tour of southern Spain. She tried to get Klug to come along, but failed. Having read Hemingway, Klug was determined — in the face of Rosalind's strong disapproval — to remain in Madrid to go to the bullfight. So in a threesome once again, she went to Toledo, Seville and Cordoba. She got on very well with Odile Crick, but did not indulge in any feminine confidences and they never conversed in French. The couple found her great fun. They knew nothing about her private life. ‘But,' said Crick, ‘did anyone?'

 

She and Don Caspar had two papers coming out in
Nature:
not joint, but companion publications. In fact, she had written every word of his so that her own could appear. Caspar, like many scientists, found writing up results a tedious chore compared with the fun of experiment. Together their papers proclaimed the news: that the tobacco virus is hollow (his paper) and that along the groove between protein subunits, the RNA winds like an inner lining (her paper). Their respective graphs, when superimposed, nicely revealed the exact location of the RNA: at a radius of about 45 Angstrom from the axis of the intact virus.

She was still fighting for the future of her group. Even before she left for Madrid, she wrote what was, as scientific correspondence goes, a passionate letter to Slater, telling him that the work her group was doing ‘is concerned with what is probably the most fundamental of all questions concerning the mechanism of living processes, namely the relationship between protein and nucleic acid in the living cell . . . The plant viruses consist of ribonucleic acid and proteins, and provide the ideal system for the study of the in vivo structure of both ribonucleic acid and protein and of the structural relationship of the one to the other.' There was no doubt, she said, that the results obtained would throw light also onto the problem of animal viruses (such as polio). ‘Moreover, in no other laboratory, either in this country or elsewhere, is any comparable work on virus structure being undertaken.'

Rosalind's work was yielding a rich harvest of papers. By mid-July 1956 she had sent a paper to
Biochimica et Biophysica Acta
comparing three strains of TMV with a cucumber virus. For the same journal, she and Holmes did another paper giving precise measurements about the internal shape of the cucumber virus. And the papers by herself and Caspar that had come out in
Nature
in May were recognised as technically remarkable for demonstrating the application of the new technique of isomorphous replacement to a non-crystalline specimen.

More cheering news was that another Gordon Conference beckoned from New Hampshire. She was being invited to one on nucleic acids this time; Don Caspar was going too. Best of all was the glimmer of hope about future funding. Robley Williams, among others, had suggested to her that the ARC was not her only recourse. Why did she not consider applying to the US National Institutes of Health in Washington for funds? She did not take much persuading. The American connection began to look like a lifeline.