In the meantime, he had gone back to consult his wise man at the MRC, who was Sir Edward Mellanby, the secretary. The timing could not have been better. Mellanby was assessing a proposal to set up a new MRC unit in Sir Lawrence Bragg’s Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Its aim was to use X-ray diffraction to decipher the structure of complex proteins – a whole frontier beyond the territory being explored by Bernal at Birkbeck.
Being junior, Crick was surprised when Mellanby asked his opinion on the proposal. ‘Excellent idea,’ he replied, adding that he had now learned enough biology to realise that this was an area which excited him. Mellanby approved, and in June 1949, Francis Crick began as a rather old (thirty-three years) PhD student with Max Perutz and John Kendrew, at the new MRC Unit in the Cavendish Laboratory.
Alien
The thumbnail sketch of Max Perutz prepared for his Nobel Prize (one of eleven awarded so far to members of the MRC Unit) completely fails to capture the essence of the man. It mentions his birth (Vienna, 1916); his university studies, also in Vienna; his PhD at the Cavendish; ‘defence-related projects’ during the war; and spending ‘some time’ in Canada. Several gaps need to be filled in.
After graduating in chemistry in Vienna in 1936, Perutz spent a year with J.D. Bernal in Cambridge and began digging into the vast and impenetrable protein haemoglobin (molecular weight, 64,000). In 1938, he was high up the Jungfraujoch in the Swiss Alps, combining his passions for mountaineering and crystallography to work out how snow turned into ice. The outbreak of war found him back in England with his parents (whom he had extricated from Austria) and ready to work with Bragg on the X-ray structure of haemoglobin.
Then he was sent to Canada, on the orders of Winston Churchill who had been persuaded by his chiefs of staff that scientists who had fled Germany or Austria were ‘a most dangerous source of subversive activity’. Perutz and hundreds of other ‘alien refugees’ – enough to establish a ‘captive university’ – were shipped across the Atlantic and interned in Newfoundland. Some months later, he was returned to London to work on a bizarre defence project he knew only as ‘Habakkuk’. His contribution involved freezing mixtures of water and wood pulp in a cold room beneath the Smithfield meat market. It transpired that the aim was to make a floating airbase for refuelling warplanes in mid-Atlantic; the reinforced ice was bullet-proof and remarkable stuff, but ‘Habakkuk’ eventually sank without trace.
After the war, Perutz returned to Cambridge and resumed his overdue PhD on haemoglobin with Bragg. This went well but barely scratched the surface of this massive molecule. There was too much information, with far too many spots on the X-ray photographs; cracking the structure was going to be a very long haul.
In autumn 1947, Sir Lawrence Bragg approached Mellanby at the MRC with a tentative request for funding to support Perutz and John Kendrew, who had started a PhD on myoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in muscle. Plans for a formal proposal gelled nicely over lunch in the Athenaeum, and the MRC snapped it up. The MRC Unit for the Study of the Molecular Structure of Biological Systems began operations in 1948 – and even a fantasist might not have predicted the astonishing record of success that would spin out of this modest enterprise.
Francis Crick seemed shy when he first went to see Perutz and Kendrew about doing a PhD on protein X-ray crystallography, but this was quickly revealed to be a false impression. Crick was described as ‘tall, fair and very English’, with a ‘somewhat dandified appearance’, a loud voice which remained forte while talking at the back of other people’s lectures, and an explosive laugh that could pinpoint his location within a reasonably large building. Those allergic to Crick found his laugh particularly enervating.
He settled in quickly. As Perutz later said, ‘the first thing he did was to read everything that we had published, and the second was to start picking holes in it’. Views about Crick soon polarised, just as they had in the Admiralty. Perutz and Kendrew saw the intellect beneath the irritants, but the main impact on Sir Lawrence Bragg was the fraying of nerves.
Bragg Junior had not matured as gracefully as his father, the benign and patricianly ‘Old Man’ with the twinkling blue eyes. It was easy to tell when things were going well, from the energy with which Bragg bounded upstairs, singing ‘Onward, Christian soldiers!’ His frequent bad moods were also readily detectable. Bragg later confessed that he was ‘fiercely irritated’ by Crick, who easily pushed him ‘off the deep end’ with his laugh, voice and unbearable ebullience. Crick also had the tiresome knack of solving problems that had floored others, including Bragg – underhand behaviour that Bragg said was ‘like doing other people’s crosswords’.
Crick first pushed Bragg ‘off the deep end’ just a few months into his PhD. It was unfortunate that Crick decided to give a seminar about the hopelessness of the strategy devised by Perutz and Bragg to crack the structure of haemoglobin. The title he chose for his talk (wickedly suggested by Kendrew) was also doomed to go down badly with the short-fused Bragg, even though it was from an ode by Keats: ‘What mad pursuit’.
Predictably, Bragg was incandescent. Crick was half his age and already five years older than Bragg had been when he won his Nobel Prize – and was still trying to learn the basics of the science that Bragg had helped to establish. Worst of all, though, Crick was right. Bragg’s resentment of Crick smouldered on and flared up instantly whenever provoked. Crick relished the memory of being told off by Bragg for ‘rocking the boat’, after loudly pouring scorn on classical crystallography while waiting for a talk to begin.
Back in the Admiralty, they might already have disciplined Crick for insubordination. At the Cavendish, they tolerated him because it was clear that he had something exceptional to offer.
Traction and friction
While bedding down in Cambridge, Crick maintained his links with Maurice Wilkins. Their correspondence began in 1948, when Wilkins sent a sympathetic note after the death of Crick’s father, recalling his own pain on being similarly bereaved. Crick then put Wilkins in touch with friends who were leaving a tiny attic flat in Soho (‘like the cabinet of Dr Caligari’), which enabled Wilkins to move out of his sister’s house in Hampstead.
Meat was still rationed, but the markets of Soho fired Wilkins’s interest in cooking and entertaining. One early invitation began ‘My dear Crick’ and conjured up a parody of life in Cambridge that might have been close to the truth. Wilkins enquired about ‘the cold wind blowing across the fens . . . whistling through the barbed wire on college walls . . . and congealing the culture media in the Strangeways’, and invited Crick to dinner when he was next in London. ‘I have made some very good dinners lately and I am getting in a barrel of cider. Do let me know, won’t you? Yours, Maurice Wilkins.’
Odile was drawn in and a ménage à trois took shape: supper in her flat, using whichever bohemian ingredients Wilkins had acquired in Soho; Odile cooking while the men talked science; the science guillotined as soon as food reached the table. Reflecting long afterwards, Wilkins thought that the year between the summers of 1950 and 1951 was a ‘golden age’, made complete by his friendship with Crick. It was not perfect, however. His own lack of a partner preoccupied him, and although he found Crick effortless and engaging company, some of the things that he held dear – films, music, theatre, politics – meant nothing to Crick.
They also disagreed about what was exciting in science. Wilkins was increasingly drawn to DNA, and Crick could not understand why. He told Wilkins, while they were sitting on the Embankment behind King’s, that he was wasting his time and should change to something important: proteins, of course. Nonetheless, the DNA project went well – hence Wilkins’s apologetic note in mid-June 1950, cancelling the Cricks’ overnight stay.
That July, Wilkins went to Perutz’s lab in Cambridge for one of the joint meetings at which both MRC Units reported progress, compared notes and shared intelligence. Wilkins told them about Signer’s DNA and its remarkable, unexpected crystalline structure. This was received without obv
ious excitement, but then he was talking to hard-bitten protein specialists.
Back at King’s, DNA was being taken apart. Bruce Fraser, one of the PhD students, ran Signer’s DNA through the infra-red apparatus which he was using to probe molecular structures. He confirmed Astbury’s deduction that the bases were stacked one above the other, at right angles to the long axis of the molecule. Interesting things happened when the DNA fibres were stretched; the infra-red data indicated that the bases were pulled out of the horizontal plane and were now tilted at 45 degrees to the molecule’s long axis.
In September, Wilkins received a cheery postcard from Naples, addressed to ‘Dear Morris’ [sic]. The card was from Ray Gosling, 2,000 miles into his grand European motorbike tour, and showed Perseus holding up the severed head of Medusa. This reminded Gosling of Wilkins, ‘presumably by now waving aloft a triumphant solution to the Nucleic Acid problem’. They were certainly making progress. By the end of the autumn, they had enough data to send a short paper to Nature. It was published early in 1951 – the first paper from King’s about DNA.
By now, the MRC Biophysics Unit was over halfway through its five years of start-up funding. Wilkins found the whole thing a thrilling ride: ‘We were carried along on a wave, though we did not know where it would take us.’ Randall’s Circus projected a happy, democratic and cooperative image. Everyone worked in harmony, and let their hair down at the annual cricket match and the legendary Christmas parties, complete with skits, songs and even a mini-opera about the various acts in the circus. In the thick of the fun was Randall, usually ‘not a man known for his small talk’ but here laughing uproariously at all the ‘office humour’, even when it was directed at him.
The star turn was Maurice Wilkins, Assistant Director and Randall’s confidant and sounding-board. Their careers were ‘inextricably intertwined’, but Wilkins was not always on easy terms with the man he always addressed familiarly in letters as ‘Dear Professor’. The pattern had been set back in Birmingham by Randall’s demand for authorship of the papers to which he had contributed nothing – a confrontation which had sent Wilkins off to seek psychoanalysis. They fell out again in St Andrew’s, when Randall refused to tell his new lecturer what he had learned from a tour of American labs. Since then, the ‘stand-up row’ had become a roughly annual event, usually followed by Randall’s peace offering of a plant from his garden.
All this left Wilkins confused by Randall’s ‘baffling negative side’ and unpredictability. ‘I admired and respected him,’ he wrote later, ‘but I cannot really say that I found him very likeable.’ Wilkins could see Randall’s ‘ruthless wisdom’ but missed other facets of his character – hints of Napoleon, Caesar and Machiavelli – that were evident to others. He also spotted un-happiness and self-pity in his boss, but it was only years later, after Randall’s death, that Wilkins came closer to understanding what had made him tick. In reality, Randall was frustrated and jealous. His managerial duties were dragging him away from hands-on research, his first love as a scientist; he wanted his team to fly, but was desperate to fly with them. His resentment focused on Wilkins, his right-hand man who spent all his time doing the things that Randall wanted to do. And Wilkins carried on regardless.
Outwardly, Wilkins still looked the part: hard-working, productive, enjoying hilarity with Ray Gosling, cooking and talking science with the Cricks, and his new hobbies of painting and fencing. However, his life lacked happiness and fulfilment. He was ‘trying hard to find someone to marry’, but the women he encountered fell short of the mark. Angst and depression stalked him relentlessly and he later admitted that he had to fight off thoughts of suicide. He hid all this from his friends and colleagues, who never suspected that the Assistant Director arrived at work each morning, fresh from an hour on the psychoanalyst’s couch.
But his resilience was being eroded by those hidden anxieties, and his ability to read people and their motives had not advanced – a bad combination for the moment, almost inevitable in the competitive world of science, when he would run up against someone determined to do him down.
In December 1950, Randall announced that another crystallographer was to join the Unit. Excellent pedigree – Cambridge PhD, currently doing innovative work in Paris on the structure of coal – and funded by a three-year industrial fellowship to study the X-ray diffraction of protein solutions. Wilkins suggested that DNA would be more exciting, and somewhat to his surprise – because the chief did not always welcome advice – Randall jumped at the idea. He wrote to the incoming fellow on 4 December 1950, proposing the change of direction and outlining the resources available at King’s.
This was one of those pivotal moments that determines the course of history. Randall could easily have copied the letter to Wilkins, or just told him what he had written, but he did neither. Like two trains approaching a busy railway junction when the points are switched, Wilkins and the new fellow were sent down a track that led to confrontation and misery.
L’Etrangère
Randall’s portentous letter of 4 December 1950 was addressed to Dr R.E. Franklin at a smart Parisian address on the Left Bank of the Seine, just downriver from Notre Dame. Dr Franklin was an excellent catch, but if Randall had read between the lines of her curriculum vitae, he might have sensed that her integration into his Unit might not be entirely smooth.
Rosalind Franklin (Figure 20.3) was thirty years old when she started at the MRC Biophysics Unit in January 1951. In one sense, she had come home; King’s is five kilometres due east of her birthplace in the affluent suburb of Bayswater. Her father was a banker, wealthy enough for Rosalind to take for granted the nanny and servants; the holidays to Norway and the south of France; and at the age of 17, a grandstand seat with a ‘six-course course champaign [sic] lunch’ on St James’ at the coronation of King George VI. Although religion did not play a large part in Franklin’s life, her parents were proud of their noble Jewish lineage. The family was close-knit, although Franklin later revealed that she kissed her mother only occasionally, and her father never.
Figure 20.3 Rosalind Franklin.
St Paul’s Girls’ School equipped Rosalind admirably for some aspects of life, but not others. She showed flashes of academic excellence, together with obstinacy and a fierce temper. In June 1937, she scored the highest marks in chemistry in the Cambridge Entrance examination and won a place to read Natural Sciences at Newnham College, then one of two Cambridge colleges that admitted women. She found Cambridge exciting but challenging. The high points of her first year included seeing the legendary Sir Lawrence Bragg at the Cavendish, and – despite self-doubts – the second highest marks in the class. The family’s summer holiday to Norway in late August 1939 was also memorable – cut short with a dash to the Bergen-Newcastle ferry, which delivered them home shortly before war was declared on Germany.
The second year introduced her to ‘crystal physics’, with Bragg’s Law and the Astbury-Yardley Tables; she just missed J.D. Bernal, who had recently moved to Birkbeck. Her third year began with the Blitz. Soon after, several scientists disappeared from the Cavendish; they were among the ‘aliens’ taken away on Churchill’s command for internment in Newfoundland, and included Max Perutz.
Another refugee made a great impact on Franklin: the Frenchwoman Adrienne Weill, a former pupil of Marie Curie, who had persuaded Bragg to find her a job at the Cavendish even though she was an alien too. Weill epitomised everything that was colourful, stylish and sophisticated about the French. She ran a lively hostel full of French refugees, a community that left Franklin thinking how boring the English were. Weill took a more worldly view of her new protégée, noting that ‘St Paul’s School produces girls who are ashamed to be women’. This may seem harsh, but Franklin was twenty-one years old when she discovered (by asking a medical student) how babies are made.
Franklin was again attacked by self-doubts before her final exams, this time with good cause. She blamed a head cold and the tranquillisers she took for pre-exam nerves; her s
upervisor saw a top-class mind tripped up by perfectionism and chaotic planning. Franklin missed the First that she had hoped for, but was awarded a one-year research scholarship with Ronald Norrish FRS, Professor of Physical Chemistry. This was a catastrophic pairing. Franklin found the project boring and detested Norrish, an ‘autocratic bully’ who enjoyed humiliating students. Franklin thought him ‘stupid, bigoted, deceitful, ill-mannered and tyrannical’.‡ Their personality clash led to a shouting match, during which Franklin proved herself to be correct (which Norrish hated), and stood up to him (which he admired). He later offered her a PhD, and seemed surprised when she turned him down.
In August 1942, Franklin left Cambridge to do a PhD at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA), in Kingston-upon-Thames, south-west of London. The place was ‘miles from anything’ but the project ‘sounded not too bad’. Her three years’ work on the porosity of carbon in coal produced a solid PhD thesis – submitted to Cambridge in time to celebrate Victory in Europe – and a paper for the Faraday Society.
While searching for the next job, Franklin wrote to Adrienne Weill, who had returned to Paris. If an opportunity came up there for ‘a physical chemist who knows very little about physical chemistry but a lot about holes in coal, please let me know’. Weill did better, and in August 1946 alerted a colleague that Franklin was due to present her research at a meeting in the Royal Institution. Weill’s contact was greatly impressed by Franklin’s paper, her ‘abrupt and peremptory’ attack on someone else’s research and – when he talked to her afterwards – her good spoken French. Her new admirer was Jacques Mering, mid-forties and director of a twenty-strong group in Paris which used X-ray diffraction to probe the ‘disordered structures’ of clays and other non-crystalline materials. Mering conjured up money for the spirited young Englishwoman, and in February 1947, Franklin abandoned the grey misery of post-war London for the Rive Gauche.
Unravelling the Double Helix Page 30