When William Bragg arrived to replace Dewar, the Institution had declined into a mournful place with ‘the forlorn feeling of a harbour when the tide has gone out’. Chiselling the Institution out of the mediocrity in which it had become fossilised was a harder task than he had faced in Adelaide nearly forty years earlier, but he was determined to recapture its former glory. As well as his brilliant mind and a steely will to succeed, the sixty-one-year-old Bragg brought ‘charm and suavity’ which ‘rapidly won all hearts’.
Bragg led from the front, as Faraday had done, in taking the excitement and fun of science out of the laboratory and into the real world. His media were the Institution’s lecture theatre, the radio and the printed page. His own Christmas Lectures, especially ‘The Universe of Light’ (1931), were hugely popular, as were the books which gathered together each series of talks. One of the countless ‘Juveniles’ whose eyes were opened by Bragg was thirteen-year-old Dorothy Crowfoot. She succeeded in her aim to follow in his footsteps, but unlike him, actually went to Stockholm to collect her Nobel Prize for X-ray crystallography.
Occasional messages were not broadcast with absolute clarity. When Erwin Schrödinger, Nobel prizewinner in Physics, came to the Institution in 1929 to talk about Wave Theory, the audience included an ‘enthusiastic but unmathematical’ yachtsman who evidently had not read the fine print. Otherwise, the Royal Institution was back where it belonged, at the forefront of public engagement, and Sir William Bragg had established himself as Britain’s greatest living ambassador for science.
Young blood
Raising the Institution’s research from the grave was Bragg’s biggest challenge. This was partly his own fault, because his ambition was to make the place a world-class centre for X-ray crystallography. He began by bringing in three young scientists whom he had recruited at University College. All were in their early twenties and gifted in different and complementary ways; they worked well together and were living proof that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. When eventually they went their separate ways, they spread the Bragg diaspora to Oxford, Cambridge and Leeds and each found fame for creating a new niche in X-ray crystallography. And later still, one of them was destined to obtain the first evidence that the DNA molecule has a regular helical structure.
The ‘pillar’ of Bragg’s new research unit was twenty-year-old Kathleen Yardley, who had caught his eye a year earlier. He had been examining the BSc in Physics at London University, and she made herself conspicuous by getting top marks (actually the highest marks in over a decade). Yardley was a Norfolk girl but had been born in southern Ireland. So had John Desmond Bernal, who left Ireland with a scholarship to Cambridge to study Natural Sciences. There, he acquired a First, the nickname ‘Sage’ (for his apparent omniscience), and the conviction that communism was the only solution to the ills of the planet. Bernal cut a bohemian figure, with flowing hair, a laissez-faire approach to fidelity and a passion for broadcasting on a wavelength somewhere between Marx and Lenin.
The third founding member of Bragg’s X-ray crystallography group was William (Bill, to everyone) Astbury, the breezy and talkative son of a Potteries town near Stoke-on-Trent (Figure 10.1). Like Bernal, Astbury had gone to Cambridge and began collecting Firsts in Chemistry and Mineralogy. The war had hacked a swathe through his studies, but it also introduced him to X-rays. That first encounter was not exactly at the cutting edge of science. As a lowly assistant in a Royal Army Medical Corps unit in County Cork, Astbury was court-martialled (twice) for failing to look after His Majesty’s X-ray equipment, but was acquitted both times when the damage was blamed on ‘An Act of God or the King’s Enemies’. More positively, he met an Irish girl, Frances Gould, and returned to Cork after the war to carry her off to London as his wife.
Yardley, Bernal and Astbury formed a close-knit team, with the same hands-off leadership, free discussion and shared excitement as in Thomas Morgan’s group, but without the claustrophobic togetherness of the Fly Room. For light relief, they had ping-pong, introduced by Astbury to spice up lunchtimes. They each cut their teeth on projects that had nothing to do with the research that would make them famous, and which led nowhere exciting. Bernal worked on crystals of metal alloys, and Yardley and Astbury on the structures of simple organic acids. Astbury and Yardley also produced an exact guide to the X-ray characteristics for every possible shape of the basic units that make up crystals. Tabulated X-ray data for the examination of the 230 space-groups by homogeneous X-ray analysis (1925) might not sound like a bestseller, but the ‘Astbury-Yardley Tables’ were an instant hit and rapidly became the crystallographers’ bible.
Figure 10.1 William (Bill) Astbury.
For Bernal, these were ‘the most exciting years of my scientific life’, packed with inventiveness, improvisation and ‘exceptional luck’. He found Bragg’s X-ray spectrometer fiddly beyond endurance and so built an automatic X-ray camera from odds and ends that could have been nicked from a scrapyard: ‘a few pieces of brass tubing’, aluminium and lead foil, glass from miners’ lamps, bicycle clips (to hold the film), the innards of an alarm clock to rotate the crystal – and ‘plenty of sealing-wax to stick everything together’. It worked, and produced stunning X-ray photographs which for the first time revealed the beautifully layered structure of graphite.*
Bernal also provided thumbnail sketches of daily life (‘routine’ would be completely the wrong word) in the Institution. His own laboratory was underground, in the chilly basement where Faraday had built some of his electromagnetic machines, and which was still ‘festooned with flasks full of Dewar’s rare gases’. It was there that, at a critical moment in a crucial experiment, he dropped a tiny specimen of an alloy more precious than gold. He never found it, but the spectacle of Bernal ‘on his knees, looking for his one and only crystal of gamma-bronze’ was Kathleen Yardley’s ‘most joyous recollection of this period’. Bernal also conducted some ‘crazy experiments’, such as taking X-ray diffraction photographs of the leg of a live frog, with the muscles either relaxed or stimulated electrically to make them contract. Like the frog, science did not leap forward as a result.
Their personalities were an eclectic and lively mix. Kathleen Yardley was ‘unobtrusive but had such an underlying strength of character that she became from the outset the presiding genius of the place’. Astbury was ‘slapdash and imaginative, with unflagging enthusiasm which kept us all going’. They wandered in and out of each other’s rooms when a thought or a question struck. At the informal gatherings, with everyone lying back in easy chairs in the study of Bragg’s flat, discussion also ranged freely, ‘with continual comments and interruptions, especially from Astbury’. And presiding over them all was the ‘Old Man’, Sir William Bragg: ‘gentle and humane . . . tall and rosy-cheeked with dark, friendly eyes’. As Bernal wrote, ‘None of those there, then in their twenties, would ever have wanted to work anywhere else . . . We had to be kicked out.’
Double act
Meanwhile, Bragg the Younger had been building his own empire, some 160 miles to the north of his father’s. In 1919, he had moved to the Chair of Physics in Manchester to replace Ernest Rutherford, who had been poached by Cambridge to succeed J.J. Thomson as their Professor of Physics and Director of the Cavendish Laboratory.
Lawrence Bragg applied himself to creating the northern powerhouse of X-ray crystallography with the same energy that his father had focused on the Royal Institution. His team marched steadily through the mineral kingdom, with bold forays into the ‘silicates’ which form beautiful but complicated crystals. Conventional mathematics could not cope with analysing the diffraction patterns of these cryptic molecules, but an exceedingly clever process called ‘Fourier transformation’ galloped to the rescue. For those intimidated by mathematical equations which hunt in packs, Fourier transformation is the kind of thing that makes you want to lie down in a quiet, dark place. Luckily, it did the trick and enabled the Manchester team to conquer new realms of crystallographic complexity.
Pastures new
During 1927, Bragg’s three fledglings all began to display signs of restlessness. The first to fly the nest was Kathleen Yardley, who had become Mrs Lonsdale and was bound for Leeds where her physicist husband had accepted a post with the Silk Research Association. Lonsdale quickly proved that she was no camp follower, by winning a scholarship to continue her X-ray crystallography work in the Chemistry Department. Before long, she cracked the structure of the organic compound, hexamethylbenzene and sent Bragg a copy of her forthcoming paper. This showed that the benzene ring, one of the fundamental building-blocks of organic chemistry, was indeed the flat hexagon that had been portrayed hypothetically in textbooks for over sixty years. Bragg wrote approvingly, ‘I think your new result is perfectly delightful.’ Lonsdale’s sojourn in Leeds was to last only two years, as her husband’s next job was back in London. She returned to the Institution to continue her work, now a busy mother with a young family but still a temporary research assistant, living from one short-term grant to the next.
Later in 1927, an opportunity came up that appealed greatly to both Astbury and Bernal: a lectureship in mineralogy at Cambridge. Both were called to interview and each performed true to type. Astbury’s response to a question about collaborative research was a curt, ‘I’m not prepared to be anybody’s lackey.’ Bernal, his hair streaming like a banner for extra dramatic effect, took them by storm with a forty-five-minute oration about his research vision. The Professor of Mineralogy, dazed by Bernal’s ‘eloquent, passionate, masterly, prophetic’ exposition, later explained that ‘There was nothing for it but to elect him.’
Astbury was badly stung by his failure to get the job and took an uncharacteristically long time to recover his joie de vivre. But being a no-nonsense Northerner, he would not have read too many omens into the bang with which the Royal Institution saw out 1927. A couple of hours after everyone had gone home after the Christmas Lecture on ‘Engines’, the electricity substation which supplied the Davy Faraday Laboratory blew up. Luckily, the only casualty was the original tiered lecture theatre, but it was completely wrecked. It took several years for a near-replica to be built, as faithfully as rather more stringent safety regulations would allow.
By then, Astbury’s days at the Institution were numbered. The seeds of his salvation had been sown a couple of years earlier, while Bragg was gathering ideas for his 1926 Royal Institution Lecture on The imperfect crystallisation of common things’. Bragg had set out to explore materials whose internal structures remained mysterious, partly because they were too ubiquitous to be exciting. Among his props was an item that seemed almost as crazy as Bernal’s attempt to capture the diffraction pattern of a frog’s leg.
Bragg asked Astbury to take an X-ray photograph of a single human hair. The diffraction pattern that Astbury obtained from the hair was ‘imperfect’, just as Bragg had expected: not the clean-cut geometrical array of dots thrown out by a mineral crystal, but a messier landscape of fuzzy streaks, spots and arcs. Astbury was intrigued, and after the disappointment in Cambridge, began to look deeper into biological materials that were less ordered and more mysterious than crystals.
Everything fell into place in the spring of 1928, when Bragg received a letter from the University of Leeds. The Worshipful Company of Clothmakers had stumped up the cash to create a new lecturer post in Textiles, specifically to inject the rigour of physics into the subject. Did Bragg know of any suitable candidates? He did, and he laid it on thick. Dr William Astbury was ‘a brilliant man . . . energetic and persevering . . . has done first-class research which is quoted everywhere . . . he has the research spirit’. In short, ‘the perfect person for the job’. And just as Cambridge had been obliged to appoint Bernal, Leeds snapped up Astbury.
The chain of events that guided Astbury to Leeds began with the human hair that he had strung up in the X-ray camera for Bragg’s lecture a couple of years earlier. It would be an exaggeration to suggest that Astbury’s future hung on that hair, but he would soon have good reason to be grateful to Bragg for introducing him to ‘the imperfect crystallisation of common things’. This apparently unpromising material led to an astonishingly rich research theme and a successful career – and to a discovery that would bring Astbury to within spitting distance, if not a hair’s breadth, of the chance to rewrite the story of the double helix.
Contactless transactions
Even as Bill Astbury settled into his last few months at the Royal Institution, a new tributary of that river of scientific discovery was coming into existence. It appeared from nowhere, like a spring welling up out of dry ground, and for over a decade it would show no inclination to flow in any particular direction.
Its presence was first revealed when a distinguished German scientist came to visit an English colleague in August 1927, within days of the interview that carried J.D. Bernal off to Cambridge. The German was thoroughly familiar with his colleague’s work but had no idea what he looked like, because the Englishman was an odd fellow who never went to scientific meetings. The Englishman’s laboratory was vastly inferior to the German’s state-of-the-art facilities, and might even have given the impression of being run by two men and a dog. However, the German was knocked sideways when he heard about something that the Englishman had stumbled upon – and the first thing he did on returning home was to repeat those experiments, because he could not believe what he had been told.
It was certainly controversial stuff. The Englishman claimed that he had transferred inherited characteristics into living organisms, not through the normal process of reproduction but by manipulating dead, inert material on his laboratory bench. The recipients of the transfer were permanently altered as a result, and they faithfully transmitted that change to their progeny. The transformation was obvious enough to be seen with the naked eye and, if you had the misfortune to be a mouse, it made the difference between life and death.
Bill Astbury and the other Englishman worked in parallel universes; neither would have seen any common ground between their research interests, and neither would have predicted that these could ever come together. The other man’s heretical research was published in early 1928, just as Astbury was preparing to leave the Royal Institution for Leeds. The paper appeared in a journal that Astbury never had any reason to look at, and it would have made no sense to him even if someone had put it on his desk, open at the right page, for him to read. Ironically, the two men were near neighbours. If Astbury had turned east out of the Royal Institution, a brisk fifteen-minute stroll through the streets of Theatreland would have brought him to the shabby little laboratory near Covent Garden where those peculiar experiments had been done.
To make sense of what happened, we first need to make a brief diversion into the English Midlands, to an industrial town just thirty miles south of where Bill Astbury grew up. There, we shall meet one of the real villains in the saga of DNA: tiny, brutal and deadly.
* Luckily, not all the graphite samples were swept away by the cleaning lady who descended on the lab one lunchtime while Bernal was playing ping-pong.
11
MOVABLE TYPE
Case No. 272.
Male, aged 28 years. Admitted 28th January 1927.
Classic history: tiredness and a dry cough at first, then a sudden chill – as if someone had thrown a bucket of freezing water over him – followed by a fever that made the sweat pour off him. Short of breath, even when lying still, and a sharp pain that stabbed into the right side of his chest like a dagger every tim
e he took a breath. By then, he was coughing up rust-coloured sputum flecked with bright red blood. In hospital, they X-rayed his chest and put him to bed. Canvas bags filled with ice were packed around his chest, which relieved the pain a little. The doctor noted the patient’s high fever, rapid pulse and the ominous dullness in the base of his right lung. When the doctor held the X-ray up to the light, even the patient could see something wrong. Half of one of his lungs was missing.
Diagnosis: a typical case of lobar pneumonia, affecting the lower lobe of the right lung. Prognosis: 25 per cent mortality, even in this previously fit young man. Treatment: good nursing care.
That night, it became clear that The Captain of the Men of Death was closing in on his prey. Twelve years later, the new antibiotic sulfapyridine could have saved the patient; six years after that, penicillin would have been even better. Recently, the Rockefeller Institute in New York had reported excellent results with their new ‘oxygen tent’ – but this was Smethwick, in the aptly named Black Country near Birmingham, where earth latrines still outnumbered water-closets and oxygen tents were the stuff of fantasy. They tried the time-honoured, last-ditch treatments as the young man began to slip away. A big needle was slid into a vein and a pint of his blood was drained into a bucket. Strychnine was injected to stimulate respiration when he became too exhausted to breathe. Finally, as an act of mercy, they gave him a large dose of opium to relieve distress.
Unravelling the Double Helix Page 15