Franklin’s new post in the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l’Etat was her dream job. Liberté – Egalité – Fraternité: she embraced the lot, in work and outside. She quickly became an expert in X-ray diffraction, and the first to try untangling the ‘disordered’ carbon in coal. Mering treated her as an intellectual equal; before long, they were spending ‘whole days and on into the evenings, deep in discussion over the internal arrangements of atoms in irregular crystals’.
Being in Paris brought many things that England lacked: gastronomie, haute couture and the chance to perfect her French while conversing with scientists and intellectuals or haggling with shopkeepers. Franklin’s social life flowered in parallel with her science. At weekends and on holidays, she indulged her love of mountains, walking and travelling, writing home about the beauty of the High Alps and sunrises that moved her to tears. In contrast to her love affair with France, Paris in the springtime did not bring romance to Dr Rosalind Franklin. Jacques Mering was a classic Gallic charmer, whose green eyes roamed over the young women in his group (many of whom were delighted for him to exercise his droit du seigneur). When Franklin joined the group, Mering already had a wife (pre-war and off-scene) and a mistress (formerly a research assistant and very much on the scene), who soon became his second wife. It has been claimed that Mering made advances to Franklin and that she responded in kind, but there is no evidence that their relationship was anything but strictly professional.
All good things come to an end, although it is difficult to understand why Franklin decided to return to England. The flipside of her passionate Francophilia was a deepening Anglophobia, and absence had not made her heart grow fonder. Beside the brilliance and vivacity of life in Paris, her own compatriots led a dull, lumpen existence: ‘What depresses me most about the English is their vacant stupid faces and child-like complacency.’
In autumn 1949, she applied to join Bernal’s group at Birkbeck but was turned down, just as Francis Crick had been a couple of years earlier. In March 1950, she flew to London to talk to Charles Coulson, Professor of Theoretical Physics at King’s, whom she knew from the coalface at BCURA. Coulson had nothing to offer but introduced her to John Randall, who suggested that she apply for an industrial research fellowship to bring her X-ray skills to bear on ‘colloidal’ proteins, as found in the cytoplasm of cells.
Franklin was in two minds about the offer, possibly because she felt that industrial funding was beneath her. ‘Half of me is hoping I don’t get it,’ she wrote, but she did. In June 1950, she was awarded a three-year Turner & Newall Fellowship to work with Randall on X-diffraction of protein solutions. The fellowship was well paid, but she was annoyed to discover that her sponsor was a company somewhere up north that traded in cement and asbestos. She accepted the post, but asked Randall to delay the start by four months to January 1951, so that she could finish writing up her work in Paris.
On 24 November 1950, she sent Randall a long letter, detailing the equipment she would need. She was unaware of how dramatically the world had moved on. By now, Wilkins and Gosling had taken X-ray photographs of Signer’s ‘pristine’ DNA and, intoxicated by its crystalline structure, had knocked back the VIPs’ sherry. And Randall had agreed with Wilkins that the new fellow would be better employed joining in the DNA research rather than photographing colloidal proteins.
On 4 December, Randall wrote back to Dr Franklin, explaining that ‘the X-ray work here is in a somewhat fluid state’ and that ‘the slant of research’ had changed. It now seemed ‘a great deal more important’ for her to ‘investigate the structure of certain biological fibres in which we are interested’ – specifically DNA, an ‘extremely important constituent of cells’.
The new plans had been discussed in depth with ‘the senior people concerned’. The only qualified X-ray crystallographer in the Unit, Alec Stokes, would not be involved, as he now wanted to concentrate on ‘theoretical problems’. To clarify: ‘This means that as far as the experimental X-ray effort is concerned there will be at the moment only yourself and Gosling’, with the temporary help of a visiting American student. Franklin might return later to proteins, but for now ‘we do feel that the work on fibres would be more immediately profitable and, perhaps, fundamental’.
Randall did not bother to ask Franklin’s opinion; he evidently assumed that she would agree to the change in direction. There was an even more regrettable lapse in communication, as Randall claimed to have cleared his plans with ‘the senior people’, but had not consulted the person currently working on DNA. That person was mentioned only in passing: ‘Gosling, working in conjunction with Wilkins, has already found that [DNA] provided by Professor Signer of Bern gives remarkably good fibre diagrams.’
Now, Randall was reclaiming Ray Gosling – with whom Wilkins enjoyed ‘hilarious times’ while supervising his PhD – and reassigning him to work under Rosalind Franklin. And although Wilkins had already presented the crystalline structure in Cambridge, Randall was writing him out of the ‘experimental X-ray effort’ on DNA.
We can only guess how Wilkins would have reacted, if he had known what his chief had done behind his back.
* The site was identified as a ‘special target’ for aerial bombing in a prophetic article in the Illustrated London News of May 1928.
† A less poetic member of Wilkins’s team thought that DNA gel looked like snot.
‡ Franklin was wrong about ‘stupid’. In 1967, Norrish was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
21
TEAM BUILDING
Rosalind Franklin began her Turner & Newall fellowship on Friday 5 January 1951. The following Monday, Randall called her in to meet Alec Stokes, the ‘theoretical’ crystallographer, with Ray Gosling and the American student. Maurice Wilkins was on an extended New Year holiday in the Welsh mountains, walking and reading Jane Austen with his German girlfriend; anyway, he had not been invited. Preliminary discussion of the DNA project allowed Gosling and the others to form their first impressions of the newcomer. The consensus was: ‘very attractive, beautiful dark eyes, and shining black hair’; ‘very bright and intense’; but ‘awkward in conversation, very impatient and very opinionated’.
Franklin could not start work immediately. She wanted better equipment and yet more time to finish the papers still hanging over from Paris. She and Gosling sat down to design a tilting X-ray camera, which was so sophisticated that the workshop at King’s declared it ‘quite impossible’ to construct. It eventually took months of ‘negotiation and strife’ to thrash out a compromise and build the instrument. Meanwhile, Franklin modified the hydrogen-humidifying system so that DNA could be X-rayed bone dry, damp or wet. Gosling found her easy to work with, but she made no effort to befriend the others in the Unit. She was badly missing Paris, for which London was a pallid substitute, made all the grimmer by bomb damage and rationing.
On his return, Wilkins went to see Franklin in her office, a small, gloomy room in the basement. His first impression was favourable: ‘quietly handsome, with steady, watchful dark eyes’, and so strong a personality that he expected her to be taller when she stood up. She ‘clearly knew what she was talking about’, and he saw no hint of trouble ahead. Over the next few weeks, he realised that they had significant things in common – left-wing politics and a love of theatre, arts, cooking and mountains – some of which could have filled those voids in his friendship with Francis Crick. But he found her occasionally unfathomable (why did she have a mirror on the wall facing her chair?), with an unpredictable ‘spikiness’ that kept him on his guard.
As a result, they worked harmoniously but in parallel. On several occasions, they ate Saturday lunch together at the Strand Palace Hotel after a morning in the lab, sometimes with colleagues and sometimes à deux. But neither invited the other round to supper.
On 1 February, Randall delivered a lecture on ‘An experiment in biophysics’ to the Royal Society. This was a round-up of four years of achievement by his Unit; i
t was also unashamed propaganda, as the first five-year block of funding would run out that autumn, and he was preparing a bid to the MRC for the next quinquennium.
The Unit’s staff now numbered forty-nine, with twenty-six scientists who included one Turner & Newall Fellow. Randall’s twenty-eight-page review was mostly devoted to the optical methods pioneered by Wilkins. Randall’s own studies on ram sperm filled just a page and a half. The two pages on DNA were all about Fraser’s infra-red findings, which supported the conclusion of Sven Furberg (recently published in a Scandinavian crystallography journal) that the sugar and the base lay at right angles in the nucleotide molecule. The extraordinary X-ray photographs obtained by Gosling and Wilkins did not figure at all.
Randall ended with heartfelt thanks for ‘the efforts of all of my colleagues, who worked so enthusiastically to a common end’. But despite that impression of unity, the first fracture lines were soon to appear.
Neapolitan delights
Wilkins later referred to it, with affection and respect, as the ‘Mecca of Zoologists’. Founded in 1872, the Stazione Zoologica di Napoli was set in an idyllic location with views across the Bay of Naples to Vesuvius, and was a haven for research, reflection and refreshment. The Stazione offered lab space to scientists from around the world, who came for weeks or months; previous visitors had included Theodor Boveri, Albrecht Kossel and Thomas Hunt Morgan. The ever-changing population of the Stazione reflected social history as well as the research topics of each age. The visiting scientists ate together at a long table – the Mensa – where everything and anything could be discussed except for politics and prejudices. During the 1930s, pro-Nazis had sat beside others who abhorred their doctrine, and conversation flowed as freely and tranquilly as it had done in happier times.
John Randall had been invited to present a paper at the Stazione’s conference on ‘The submicroscopical structure of protoplasm’ from 22 to 25 May 1951, but was too busy to attend. Wilkins went instead, and extended his stay by several days to try to tame the spermatozoa of cuttlefish. It was his first time in Naples, and he was knocked sideways by the loveliness of it all. The Stazione was beautiful. Italian girls were breathtakingly beautiful. Even the cuttlefish were beautiful. Wilkins arrived with the preconception that Sepia were ugly brutes, but having watched them in the Stazione’s aquaria, he had to agree with his hosts that he had got this wrong.
The conference attracted a small crowd of scientists from across Europe, with a few visiting Americans. The English contingent included Bill Astbury, conspicuous in his tweeds. Wilkins’s talk went down very well. He began boldly by speculating that the ‘problem of gene structure’ could be solved by studying ‘crystalline nucleoproteins in living cells’. This was guaranteed to excite anyone who believed in Schrödinger’s ‘aperiodic crystal’ theory of genes, but he held back the evidence for a final flourish: the dramatic X-ray photograph of Signer’s DNA. After the applause, Wilkins was gratified when Astbury gave ‘a little speech’, praising the DNA photograph as ‘much better’ than his own.
Once his talk was out of the way, Wilkins had work to do. Someone had forgotten to tell the speakers that they were expected to bring along a publication-ready paper about their research. Astbury recited his on the spot into a dictaphone, for his secretary in Leeds to type up. Wilkins sat down to write his paper in the old-fashioned way, while firing off several telegrams to Randall requesting photographs and odd bits of information. He sent the draft paper back to London on 31 May, with a letter to Randall that rambled across five pages: the visit ‘quite satisfactory’, Astbury ‘very friendly’, ‘general regret’ that Randall had been unable to come – and a breakthrough with the cuttlefish. Wilkins enclosed several threads of orientated spermatozoa, which he had prepared by rupturing the sperm sacs in distilled water. Maybe Randall could arrange for them to be X-rayed quickly, so that Wilkins could include the pictures in his manuscript? After all that work, Wilkins now felt that he deserved ‘a few days off’. Apart from a conference trip to the Greek temples of Paestum, he had seen nothing of Ischia. He ended by apologising for all those telegrams, said that he would return on the 8th [crossed out] 10th, and hoped that ‘the pressure of work is not too great and that my rather protracted stay is not causing inconvenience’.
Randall’s rapid and terse reply should have jolted Wilkins back to the hard reality of life at King’s. His ‘many requests and directives’ had been ‘very trying’ for Randall, who was not a ‘lab boy’. It was ‘extremely unlikely’ that the sperm threads would be photographed in time, because ‘Gosling never works very fast’. And Randall was taking back control of his own research project. ‘I shall be in direct charge of any X-ray work on sperm. I planned this particular experiment a long time ago and would like to see it through.’ He reminded Wilkins that he had tried and failed to get ‘you and others’ interested in the idea three years earlier. Possibly worrying that he might sound grumpy, Randall ended on a placatory note: ‘I hope you will manage to see something of Ischia: it is worth it.’
In her basement room at King’s, Rosalind Franklin was also working hard, but had not yet taken a single X-ray photograph of DNA. Now five months into her fellowship, she was still finishing off her papers on coal.
Life was grim compared with her painfully happy memories of Paris, but there were bright spots (none of them at King’s) to look forward to: the International Crystallography Conference in Stockholm in late June, where she could reconnect with her friends, and a holiday in France which would fill most of August. Her DNA work would not start until September 1951 – eight months late, and almost a quarter of the way through her time at King’s. But she was in no hurry. This was her own project, to run as she saw fit, and nobody else was working on DNA. Or so Randall had led her to believe.
X marks the spot
Even if Rosalind Franklin was not taking X-ray photographs of DNA, someone else was, and with extraordinary and prophetic results. The key images were obtained while Wilkins was at the Stazione Zoologica. The pattern was as striking as his image of ‘crystalline’ DNA, but looked nothing like it. If the two pictures had been projected side by side, an expert X-ray crystallographer would have said that these were two completely different substances.
The other photographs were the handiwork of Elwyn Beighton, Astbury’s former ‘lab boy’ and now PhD student. Beighton was notionally working on bacterial flagella, but also trying to follow his chief’s fancies as they flitted from topic to topic: textiles, muscles, flagella – and, after a thirteen-year gap, back to DNA in spring 1951.
Astbury had visited Erwin Chargaff’s lab in New York en route to giving his Harvey Lecture in September 1950. At the time, Astbury declined Chargaff’s gift of highly purified DNA, but he wrote to Chargaff in March 1951 to ask if the offer still stood. He had re-read Chargaff’s paper in Nature about the base ratios in various DNA species, and believed that X-ray diffraction would clarify those differences. His claim was far-fetched but Chargaff sent him samples of calf thymus DNA, warning that it had a low water content which might spoil the photographs. This prompted Beighton and Astbury to find an alternative to the dried films of DNA which Florence Bell had used. Beighton mounted DNA fibres, stretched them to four times their original length, and then kept them wet by dripping water on them throughout the exposure – which, thanks to the powerful X-ray tube he used, was only twenty minutes.
Beighton’s most dramatic photographs were numbers B293 and B299, which he took on 28 May and 1 June 1951. Astbury saw these after returning from Naples with Wilkins’s image of ‘crystalline’ DNA fresh in his mind. There was no sign of the scattered array of over a hundred spots that Wilkins had projected on the screen. Instead, both photographs showed a series of dark, linear smudges marching out diagonally from the centre of the film, forming the shape of a heavy capital X (Figure 21.1). Six months later, in December 1951, Beighton took one more photo of DNA, which Chargaff had extracted from wheat. It too showed the same bold X pattern.
Figure 21.1 B299: X-ray photograph of DNA, taken by Elwyn Beighton in June 1951.
A year later and in another place, Beighton’s photographs would have created a sensation. Instead, Astbury did not know what to make of them. This was Astbury’s last attempt to wring something miraculous out of DNA, and it failed. Perhaps he was floored by seeing a pattern so radically different from the one that Wilkins had shown – and which Astbury might have assumed to be correct, because it came from the obscenely wealthy MRC Biophysics Unit. Or maybe DNA failed to match the ‘molecular joy’ of his new passion, bacterial flagella. In any event, Beighton was redirected to the subject of his PhD and his DNA photographs were consigned to oblivion; they were never published, or even presented at a meeting. Years later, Maurice Wilkins described the fate of Beighton’s photographs as ‘pitiful’. But everything is easy in hindsight.
State of the art
Unravelling the Double Helix Page 31