Unravelling the Double Helix

by Gareth Williams

  Even though polio killed people, Franklin did not take it too seriously – just as she had disregarded the fogged film-badges in Paris and London which told her that she had been exposed to too much X-radiation. At work, the poliovirus was stored securely at the nearby School of Tropical Medicine; at home, she stashed it alongside the food in the fridge. The poliovirus proved to be a worthy adversary, and a mystery that she had not quite solved when – as had happened with DNA at King’s – her time at Birkbeck ran out.

  Franklin was invited back to the Gordon Conference in the summer of 1956, this time to speak on the X-ray structure of viruses. While there, she heard from Sir Lawrence Bragg that her model of TMV would take pride of place in the International Science Hall of the World’s Fair to be held in Brussels in two years’ time. Another landmark was the conference photo which showed her sitting beside Maurice Wilkins, albeit with neither smiling. Unfortunately, her second American tour quickly ran into difficulties. She had hoped to spend time with Don Caspar, now back at Yale, but his father died and they met only briefly. Then, shortly after her thirty-sixth birthday, she suffered bouts of abdominal pain and was told to see a doctor when she returned to England; because of visits to labs in California, that was four weeks away. By the time she flew back into London on the morning of Friday 24 August 1956, her belly had swollen and she could no longer do up her skirt; nonetheless, she went straight into work from the airport.

  For a long time, her colleagues noticed little unusual: occasional absences with a health problem that she never explained and that they never asked about. As her work never flagged, nobody thought much of it. In November 1956, while convalescing from ‘a little operation’, she stayed with the Cricks at the Golden Helix in Cambridge. Around this time, Jim Watson mentioned in a letter to Aaron Klug that he had heard that ‘Rosalind had been unwell’ and asked her to be sent his best wishes. Then she was back on the front line at Birkbeck, apparently ‘restored to health’.

  New Year 1957 found her ‘looking okay’, according to Klug. She bounced back after being off sick again in April, and met Don Caspar for a conference in Geneva and ‘a glorious weekend’ in Zermatt, where Caspar’s mother photographed them with the Matterhorn as a backdrop. It was only towards the end of 1957 that her energy began to run out; she still turned up every morning, but left at lunchtime. By late March 1958, she was working most days, but now was only able to crawl upstairs. One of her visitors at this time was Jacques Mering, who found that she had been admitted to the Marsden Hospital, which specialises in cancer. He was shocked to tears by what he saw. Nonetheless, Dr R.E. Franklin was still on the programme to speak at the Faraday Society meeting in Leeds in mid-April 1958, and at a major international conference in Wisconsin in August.

  The proceedings of the Wisconsin conference were published as a substantial book. It contains a beautifully clear chapter on ‘The structure of viruses, as determined by X-ray diffraction’, by Rosalind Franklin, Don Caspar and Aaron Klug. The chapter ends with a tribute to the first author by Wendell Stanley, who won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for crystallising TMV. Dr Franklin had been unable to present her paper; she had died on 16 April 1958. Her death had cut short a ‘life of great promise and complete devotion to scientific research’. She had been ‘a woman of great intelligence and wide culture, and an international courier of good will’ and had made ‘great contributions’ in two distinct fields, coal and viruses. Stanley singled out courage as ‘one of her most outstanding characteristics’. Despite knowing that her final illness would be fatal, she ‘never spoke about it’ and persevered ‘to the end to work and plan as though her life would continue’.

  The reality of what lay behind the workaholic facade during her last eighteen months must have tested that courage almost to destruction. Two operations for bilateral ovarian cancer; then a third, even though the recurrence was obviously inoperable; a debilitating course of radiotherapy, and the advice of a surgeon to find religion; then last-ditch chemotherapy and, for her final few days, palliation with morphine. She died three months short of her thirty-eighth birthday – within minutes of when she should have stood up to speak at the Faraday Society meeting in Leeds, and the day before her model of TMV was unveiled as ‘a central feature’ at the World’s Fair in Brussels.

  Wendell Stanley was not the only one to do her proud. J.D. Bernal wrote eloquent obituaries for her in both The Times and Nature – unusual coverage for a scientist who had not even reached mid-career. Bernal highlighted the ‘special tragedy’ of the ‘brilliant’ researcher ‘cut off at the height of her powers’. She had done much to clarify the structure of coal, viruses and DNA; her Patterson analyses of the two forms of DNA which she characterised had shown that the ‘structure was best accounted for by a double spiral of nucleotides’, with the phosphates on the outside. Bernal also praised her ‘extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook’. And as he was the consummate artist-magician of X-ray crystallography, we can trust his assertion that her images ‘were among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken’.

  Franklin herself was quite clear about the achievement for which she wished to be remembered. Her epitaph reads simply: ‘Scientist: her work on viruses was of lasting benefit to mankind.’

  Science rushed ahead faster than ever from the late 1950s onwards, and the work of Dr Rosalind Franklin could have been steadily buried in the strata of accumulating knowledge. It is likely that, within a decade or so, she would only have been familiar to those who had known her or had looked up the early literature on the structure of TMV and the poliovirus. But something extraordinary happened. Twelve years after her death, she was resurrected – and even though she was barely recognisable, this rediscovery ensured that her name would live on.

  Just rewards

  The year 1960 was a good one for Maurice Wilkins, with his professorship, a baby daughter, productive research on the structure of RNA – and the news from America that, with Watson and Crick, he had been awarded the Albert Lasker Award for medical research. Specifically, his ‘painstaking X-ray diffraction studies provided a most important clue which was pursued in an ingenious fashion and to a logical conclusion by Francis Crick and James Watson’. The award ceremony was held in San Francisco, which allowed Wilkins to introduce Patricia to old friends and places from his ‘Atom Bomb days’. The Lasker Awards had grown in stature since 1947, when Oswald Avery received the third ever for his work on the pneumococcus. The selection committee evidently had a shrewd eye for talent, as many Lasker recipients had gone on to win a Nobel Prize.

  Wilkins was surprised to be told this, but thought no more of it for a couple of years – even when he was asked to send a photograph of himself to a Dr Engstrom in Stockholm, who happened to be the secretary of the Nobel Prize Committee. A few weeks later, in October 1962, Wilkins was ‘resting up’ in a hotel in New York when a Swedish journalist rang him to say that he had won a Nobel Prize. It was a short interview, mainly because Wilkins suspected a hoax. Hours later, a telegram from Stockholm confirmed that Crick, Watson and Wilkins had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

  On returning from an impromptu press conference, Wilkins found that John Randall had left a message of congratulation on the answerphone. He sat down and wrote a thank-you note to his chief, which like every letter to Randall since 1945, began ‘Dear Professor’. (‘Dear Sir John’ would also have done, as Randall had been knighted a few months earlier.) Wilkins told him that ‘the whole success depended entirely on the MRC setting up two units, and on your initiative in building our lab’. He counted himself very fortunate, because ‘the prize could have gone completely to our friends in Cambridge’.

  Lev Landau, winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physics, had been badly injured in a car accident and was unable to travel. Six of the remaining seven Nobel laureates – covering Medicine or Physiology, Chemistry and Literature – descended on Stockholm on 10 December 1962, the anniversary of Alfr
ed Nobel’s death. Five of those six had already shared an unusual experience: they had all stood in the Cavendish to contemplate the Watson-Crick model of DNA. The prizewinners in Chemistry, for having solved the structures of haemoglobin and myoglobin, were Max Perutz and John Kendrew. The Peace Prize, traditionally presented in Oslo, was carried off that year by Linus Pauling, in recognition of his efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons. The only laureate attending the 1962 ceremonies who had not seen the double helix was John Steinbeck (Literature).

  Maurice Wilkins had not looked forward to the ceremony and had even thought of not attending. Once persuaded, his priority was to get a passport at short notice for their new baby son. In the event, it was a glittering occasion, with some telling moments (Figure 25.3). The prizes were awarded by the King of Sweden, with much pomp and circumstance, followed by a banquet and ball for over a thousand people. The atmosphere was captured in the official gallery of black-and-white photographs: the laureates lined up in white tie and tails, each clutching his medal, cheque and citation; Watson waiting to meet the King, a faraway look in his eyes; Crick dancing the twist with his daughter; and, next morning, Steinbeck being served coffee in bed by his personal St Lucia maiden in her traditional headdress of lighted candles.

  That afternoon, each laureate gave his Nobel lecture. For Watson, DNA had been the ‘prologue’; his main thrust now was messenger RNA. At the end, he thanked only the members of his lab in Harvard. Crick focused on how twenty amino acids can be encoded by three-letter combinations drawn from a four-letter alphabet. He ended by expressing the hope that the genetic code would be cracked ‘within a few years’, and had nobody to thank.

  Wilkins began with a statement that would have appealed to Phoebus Levene – ‘Nucleic acids are basically simple’ – and described the X-ray diffraction crusade which had yielded up helices and the conclusion that DNA was universal to life. He had a long list of people to thank, beginning with Sir John Randall, for ‘long-standing help and encouragement, and his vision in creating and directing a unique lab’, and ending with Crick and Watson, ‘for stimulating discussion’. Near the top was ‘my late colleague, Rosalind Franklin, who with great ability and experience of X-ray diffraction, so much helped the initial work on DNA’.

  Figure 25.3 Francis Crick, Jim Watson and Maurice Wilkins with the other Nobel laureates, 1962. Left to right: Wilkins, Max Perutz, Crick, John Steinbeck, Watson and John Kendrew.

  Wilkins’s comment to Randall that the prize could have gone only to ‘our friends in Cambridge’ was uncomfortably close to the mark. Back in 1959, Sir Lawrence Bragg and Linus Pauling, being Nobel laureates, were asked for nominations by the Prize Committee. Bragg suggested that Watson, Crick and Wilkins merited a Prize, and Perutz and Kendrew another. Pauling disagreed. He was happy to endorse Crick and Watson, but Perutz and Kendrew were ‘premature’; Wilkins was not even mentioned. It was only when Bragg put ‘every ounce of weight I could behind Wilkins’ that the Committee made him the third man of DNA.

  In general, the Prize awarded to Watson, Crick and Wilkins was seen as well deserved. Alec Stokes suggested (in jest) that his own contribution – the Waves at Bessel-on-Sea – was worth about one-5,000th of a Nobel Prize. Erwin Chargaff insisted (not in jest) that his own research merited a whole prize. To ensure that nobody missed the point, he sent a letter of complaint to over eighty prominent scientists around the world.

  At the time, nobody raised the hypothetical question of whether Rosalind Franklin, had she still been alive,† would have been in the running with Watson, Crick and Wilkins for a share of the prize and its glory.

  Publish and be damned

  Jim Watson was the first to write his version of the race to the double helix. In late 1965, he tried some sample chapters on Francis Crick; he must have selected them with care, because Crick’s only reaction on reading them was to wonder, ‘Who would want to read stuff like this?’ The book’s title, Honest Jim, was inspired by a fleeting encounter with Bill (Willy) Seeds, a crystallographer from King’s, on an Alpine trail in the summer of 1955. On recognising Watson, Seeds said only ‘How’s Honest Jim?’ and continued on his way. Seeds knew all about the ‘burglary’ of the X-ray data from King’s, but Watson did not reveal whether he detected sarcasm in the greeting.

  By March 1966, Harvard University Press had accepted Honest Jim for publication. Watson had managed to extract a foreword from Sir Lawrence Bragg – a cunning piece of diplomacy suggested by Tony North, an ex-King’s crystallographer now working with Bragg at the Royal Institution, to coax the great (and irascible) man on board. Bragg had initially been furious on discovering what Honest Jim had written about him, but was placated by his wife and decided that there was, after all, merit in this ‘record of impressions’. He praised Watson’s ‘Pepys-like frankness’ but warned that ‘those who figure in the book must read it in a very forgiving spirit’.

  Some found that impossible. On reading the whole manuscript, Crick was concerned about all the ‘judgements which I believe to be false’. Initially, he did not try to kill it off, but Maurice Wilkins did. He summarised Honest Jim as: ‘I’m Jim, I’m smart. Most of the time, Francis is smart too. The rest are bloody clots.’ This ‘distasteful’ book had to be prevented from getting into the public domain.

  In early October, Watson and Harvard University Press received letters from both of Watson’s fellow Nobel prizewinners, demanding a halt on publication. Crick criticised the gossip, the low intellectual content and the damaging ‘highly personal accounts’. Wilkins took issue with the overemphasis on ‘human failings, scandal and intrigue’ and Watson’s treatment of an absent third party – Rosalind Franklin. ‘She was my colleague,’ Wilkins wrote to Watson. ‘However just your account of her might be, I cannot approve publication. She certainly would not, if she were alive.’ Wilkins added that he did not want to be forced into saying that Watson was ‘an eccentric who should not be taken seriously’.

  Watson excised some of the nastier stuff, changed the title to Base Pairs (which riled Crick) and added an Epilogue in which he sang Franklin’s praises.‡ His old friend Francis now led the campaign to stop publication, and continued to snipe at him. In November 1966, Watson wrote to tell Crick that he was ‘very much troubled’ by his hostility to this ‘good book . . . which in no way harms you or your reputation’ – but, with regret at the thought of ‘our long, most productive and thoroughly enjoyable friendship coming to an end’, publication was going ahead.

  By now, in the best traditions of subversive writing, bootleg copies of Honest Jim/Base Pairs were in wide circulation. Crick fired off irate letters to fellow victims of Watson’s acid attacks, and to various prominent scientists and the President of Harvard. Some of their responses must have shaken him. All agreed that the book was not perfect, but several argued strongly for its publication. J.D. Bernal thought it libellous and disgraceful, and that Watson was ‘particularly unfair’ to Franklin. Nonetheless, the book was ‘astonishing . . . unequalled as a novel in the history of science’, and Bernal had been unable to put it down. Of course it should be published – and what about a film?

  In April 1967, Crick sent Watson an unpleasant six-page rant. The book was ‘naive and egotistical’ and on a par with ‘lower-class women’s magazines’. It was also ‘a violation of friendship’ and a gross invasion of Crick’s privacy. Crick warned that publication could rebound on the author; he wondered what readers would make of Watson’s obvious love for his sister, which a psychiatrist had noted with interest and which ‘friends’ in Cambridge had discussed at length but so far had refrained from writing about.

  Few books have attracted such strong views from so many Nobel laureates. In May 1967, Harvard University Press decided that this one was too hot to handle. The manuscript was immediately snapped up by a New York publisher, whose remaining concerns were quashed when Watson hired an expensive libel lawyer. Under its definitive, non-contentious title, The Double Helix was published in the USA in
March 1968 – within a few weeks of the hundredth anniversary of Friedrich Miescher’s first paper on nuclein.

  As soon as it appeared, The Double Helix whipped up a perfect storm of divided opinion. Some well-informed reviewers gave it an enthusiastic thumbs-up. For C.P. Snow – ex-scientist, now politician and writer – it was ‘like nothing else in literature’, a gateway into ‘a new world for the general non-scientific reader . . . which gives the feel of how creative science really happens’. Peter Medawar (Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, 1960) rated it ‘a classic, which will go on being read’, despite castigating Watson for having failed to mention Fred Griffith.

  By contrast, the science editor at the New York Times could not understand why this ‘bleak recitation of bickering and personal ambition’ was acclaimed as ‘the Pepys’ diary of modern science’. The writing was ‘shrill and shallow’, and Watson’s ‘attempt to bully a proud woman’ into divulging her results was particularly nasty. Unsurprisingly, Erwin Chargaff also plunged in his poison-dipped pen – and in the pages of Science, where everybody would see it. The Double Helix, with its remarkable ‘banality of content’, was not champagne, but soda water. Watson’s ‘feverish and unscrupulous haste’ and his ‘thirst for other people’s knowledge’ had reduced science to a spectator sport. The ‘cloying’ Epilogue failed to undo the ‘merciless persiflage’ to which Rosalind Franklin had been subjected. This was a new and undesirable kind of science, driven by ‘the vulgarities of the communications media’.

  After publication, Crick’s question about who would read this kind of stuff was quickly answered. Despite the critical reviews – or perhaps helped by them – The Double Helix became a phenomenon. It was a New York Times bestseller for four months, went on to be translated into over twenty languages, and has sold millions of copies worldwide.