Rosalind Franklin (39 page)

When the centenary of the Nobel prize was celebrated in 2001, Hodgkin remained the only British woman scientist to have won it. A conspicuous absentee from the Nobel pantheon of science is Jocelyn Bell, the Cambridge astronomer who discovered pulsars — energy emissions constituting a new class of stars. She was a graduate assistant at Cambridge when she made her discovery. The Nobel prize for physics in 1974, however, honoured her professor, Antony Hewish, for ‘recognising the meaning' (in the words of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica)
of his assistant's observations.

 

Rosalind's name
was
praised from the Nobel platform in Stockholm but not by Watson, Crick or Wilkins. When they gave their Nobel addresses in 1962, only Wilkins uttered her name at all, mentioning her and Alex Stokes as two people at King's College London who ‘made very valuable contributions to the X-ray analysis'. Sometime later, Randall (by then Sir John) wrote Gosling, ‘I have always felt that Maurice's Nobel lecture did rather less than justice to this setting [Randall's biophysics lab at King's] and particularly to the contribution of yourself and Rosalind.'

In 1982, however, when Aaron Klug received the prize for chemistry, he spoke movingly of his late colleague. Rosalind Franklin, he said, had introduced him to the study of viruses and set an example of tackling large and difficult problems: ‘Had her life not been cut tragically short, she might well have stood in this place on an earlier occasion.'

Klug has been Rosalind's staunchest defender. Several months following the publication of
The Double Helix,
he wrote a long article for
Nature,
saying that Watson did not pretend to tell more than one side of the story. As ‘her last and perhaps closest scientific colleague', he said, he had carefully studied her laboratory notebooks and found that, far from being anti-helical (as Watson, Crick and Wilkins continued to maintain) she had set out the evidence for a helical structure for DNA as early as her Turner and Newall report in February 1952. Although she had retreated from this position for the A form because of some of her subsequent findings, by the February and March of 1953, she was far nearer to solving the structure than anyone had realised:

 

She would have solved it, but it would have come out in stages. For the feminists, however, she has become a doomed heroine, and they have seized upon her as an icon, which is not, of course, her fault. Rosalind was not a feminist in the ordinary sense, but she was determined to be treated equally just like anybody else.

 

Klug's was a robust defence, strengthened in 1974 by a startling discovery, which he also reported in
Nature,
of a missing manuscript dated 17 March 1953, which showed that Rosalind was even closer to coming upon the truth of the double helix than even he had realised. Tactfully, however, perhaps out of respect for his fellow FRSs, Klug did not mention how irregularly her data had been obtained, and how inadequate had been her formal acknowledgement, in 1953 and 1954, and in the 1962 Nobel addresses of the DNA trio.

Nor did Klug declare his personal interest in her defence. Klug owed Rosalind a debt of honour. By making him her principal beneficiary, she changed his life, made it possible for him and his wife to buy a house and to stay in Britain where he rose to great heights. He became successively Sir Aaron, winner of the Nobel prize, holder of the Order of Merit (a tribute to greatness, in the personal gift of the Queen) and, from 1995 to 2000, President of the Royal Society.

 

Some criticism belongs to the Nobel prize itself. Founded in 1901 it is the world's most coveted intellectual award, but it is also arbitrary, inherently unfair and possibly damaging. Many who deserved it have not got it; many who didn't, have. The literature prize offers glaring examples: Thomas Mann, Leo Tolstoy and James Joyce were passed over, Somerset Maugham and Pearl Buck honoured. In science the effect is particularly baleful, because science is collegial. As research becomes progressively more expensive, moreover, scientific discoveries are harder to attribute to particular people. The Nobel prize, by canonising individuals, disguises the truth that they are all, in Newton's famous phrase, standing ‘on giants' shoulders' and on each other's as well.

The list of deserving scientists who never got the summons to Stockholm is long, glittering and bitter, and contains a number of women: the physicist Lise Meitner and the Cambridge astronomer Jocelyn Bell. Oswald Avery, who discovered that DNA was the genetic material, was deprived of the prize by the persistent and unfair criticism of his Rockefeller colleague Alfred Mirsky. In the view of Erwin Chargaff, whose finding of the base pairs of DNA went uncelebrated, ‘Avery should have gotten two Nobel prizes for his discovery. I have no complaint when I think of Avery.'

Such omissions and exclusions would not matter except that the Nobel prize changes lives, and divides colleague from colleague by touching the winners with a magic of which the generous prize money is only part.

Rosalind Franklin did not have her eyes on the prize. Nor did she worry about having been outrun in a race that no one but Watson and Crick knew was a race. She died proud of her world reputation both in coal studies and in virus research, and of her list of published papers that would do credit to any scientific career, let alone one that ended at the age of thirty-seven. Had she not gone into science, the early 1950s would have had little understanding of what kinds of coal make graphite, slower knowledge of the A and B forms of DNA and of the characteristics of TMV. There would have been a delay in getting to the DNA structure and in the revolution that followed. The careers of her collaborators and of the Nobel trio who benefited from her data could have fallen far short of the heights they reached.

Rosalind knew her worth. With every prospect of going on to further significant achievement and, possibly, personal happiness, she was cheated of the only thing she really wanted: the chance to complete her work. The lost prize was life.

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