Photograph 51

by Anna Ziegler

  WATSON: After our conversation, I approached Lawrence Bragg at the Cavendish, who took me on immediately. I was partnered upon my arrival with a scientist named Francis Crick.

  CRICK: Do you prefer Jim, or James? Jim sounds more American to me. Or how about Jimmy?

  WATSON: How about I tell you and you don’t have to keep guessing.

  CRICK: I like that idea.

  GOSLING: (To the audience.) As a child, already sure he wanted to become a scientist, Crick confessed to his mother that he worried everything would be discovered by the time he grew up. She assured him that this wasn’t the case. And from that moment on, he was single-minded…Which is truly impressive. I mean, I don’t think I’ve set my mind to something for more than five minutes in my entire life without wanting then to put the kettle on or to find that letter my brother wrote me three years ago from Wales or to try to remember the song that was playing in the dance hall when that girl walked in who looked like she might almost be willing to talk to me.

  (Lights shift. Back in the lab.)

  ROSALIND: Hello, Dr. Wilkins.

  WILKINS: Hello Miss Franklin.

  ROSALIND: And how was your conference?

  WILKINS: I hear from Gosling you’re spending some late nights here.

  ROSALIND: (Sharply.) I’m just doing my work, Dr. Wilkins. Nothing more.

  WILKINS: May I see it?

  ROSALIND: What?

  WILKINS: Your work.

  ROSALIND: Why?

  WILKINS: We’re partners, aren’t we, Miss Franklin?

  (Beat.)

  Aren’t we?

  ROSALIND: Yes we are.

  WILKINS: So let’s have it then.

  ROSALIND: For one, I fixed the camera.

  WILKINS: The humidity is no longer an issue?

  ROSALIND: It’s no longer an issue.

  WILKINS: How did you do it?

  ROSALIND: It was simple, really. I used salt solutions.

  WILKINS: And the salt didn’t spray the DNA?

  ROSALIND: No it didn’t. I assured you it wouldn’t and it didn’t.

  WILKINS: Well, I’m very impressed.

  ROSALIND: There’s no need to condescend.

  WILKINS: I wasn’t. I am seriously impressed.

  ROSALIND: But that’s ridiculous. You shouldn’t be. I used the simplest of chemist’s techniques.

  WILKINS: Whatever you did, it was wonderful!

  ROSALIND: What’s wrong with you, Dr. Wilkins? You look flushed.

  WILKINS: I do feel a little warm.

  ROSALIND: Maybe you should sit down.

  WILKINS: Yes.

  (He sits. A long beat.)

  ROSALIND: All right. That should do it. I’m sure you’re ready now to get back to work.

  (WILKINS stands and stares at her, shocked. Lights shift.)

  WILKINS: But how can we get anything done if she’s constantly making me feel as though I’m being impolite to her? No, worse—offensive.

  GOSLING: I think she’s just settling in.

  WILKINS: Did you know Linus Pauling’s on DNA now, Gosling?

  GOSLING: I didn’t.

  WILKINS: As I said, we really must push forward.

  GOSLING: And we will.

  WILKINS: All I’ve been is kind to her.

  GOSLING: (Warmly.) So maybe kindness isn’t working.

  WILKINS: Kindness always works with women, Gosling. I’m a trifle concerned for you if you didn’t know that.

  (WILKINS picks up a box of chocolates and enters the lab where GOSLING and ROSALIND are working; her back is to him.)

  GOSLING: (Noticing the chocolates.) Dr. Wilkins, you shouldn’t have.

  WILKINS: Oh—no—they’re for…

  GOSLING: I know who they’re for.

  ROSALIND: (Turning around.) Yes, Wilkins, can I help you?

  (She notices the box.)

  What is that?

  WILKINS: May I speak with you?

  ROSALIND: About what?

  WILKINS: Privately.

  ROSALIND: Well, all right. But quickly.

  (She nods at GOSLING, who doesn’t understand at first.)

  GOSLING: Oh, right.

  (He leaves. A beat.)

  ROSALIND: So?

  WILKINS: I got you these.

  (He hands her the box.)

  ROSALIND: What are they?

  WILKINS: Chocolates. (Beat.) I bought them for you.

  ROSALIND: Why?

  WILKINS: Why?

  ROSALIND: Yes, why?

  WILKINS: Oh. I suppose because I think things between us haven’t got off on a good foot. On the right foot. I want to…I wanted to…

  ROSALIND: We’ve already started again once, haven’t we? How often will we have to do this?

  WILKINS: It’s just that…I mean, I’d like to…have an easier relationship with you.

  ROSALIND: But we’re not here to have a relationship, Dr. Wilkins.

  WILKINS: (Turning red.) I didn’t mean a relationship in the, well…I meant a working relationship. An easier partnership.

  ROSALIND: Was your wife cold?

  WILKINS: I beg your pardon?

  ROSALIND: Was she cold?

  WILKINS: I don’t know what you’re…to what you’re referring…

  ROSALIND: You do, I think. After all, how many wives have you had?

  WILKINS: One.

  ROSALIND: An American who refused to return with you to England after the birth of your son.

  WILKINS: Yes.

  ROSALIND: So was she cold?

  WILKINS: She could be.

  ROSALIND: And I’m not her. We’re not married. You don’t have to try to win me over. In fact, you shouldn’t try to win me over because you won’t succeed. I’m not that kind of person.

  WILKINS: I’m just trying to…

  ROSALIND: What?

  WILKINS: Be your friend.

  ROSALIND: I don’t want to be your friend, Dr. Wilkins.

  WILKINS: You don’t?

  ROSALIND: No.

  (Beat.)

  WILKINS: Well then. Enjoy the chocolates.

  (He exits; the lights shift.)

  CASPAR: Dear Dr. Franklin, I hope this isn’t out of turn, but I wanted to let you know how immensely helpful your images have been. The work is going well. Incredibly well, actually. This morning I realized that for once I didn’t feel plagued by lack of direction, by this persistent question about what to do with my life and whether I’ve made the right choices. I have made the right choices. I just love…I mean does the X-ray camera ever seem like it’s just an extension of your own eye, as though you and you alone possess the superhuman powers that allow you to see into the heart of things? To understand the nature of the world as though it’s a secret no one else is meant to know?…I do. And I think you do too.

  ROSALIND: Dear Mr. Caspar: Thank you for your letter. And…Yes. I do share some of your…ways of thinking. It’s nice to hear that one isn’t alone.

  GOSLING: And then…then Wilkins gave a lecture and referenced “his” DNA work.

  WILKINS: I didn’t say it quite like that.

  GOSLING: He announced, to great applause, that all the X-ray patterns he’d made indicated a clear central x, a helix. And it wasn’t pretty—the aftermath, I mean. Not the helix. The helix was…beautiful.

  ROSALIND: (Condescendingly.) Flushed with pride, are we?

  WILKINS: I beg your pardon?

  ROSALIND: X-ray patterns you made?

  WILKINS: It was just a manner of speaking. Everyone knows who’s on the team, that there is a team.

  ROSALIND: Well, I don’t know which X-ray patterns you were looking at, but in the ones I took, it’s certainly not clear that there is a helix.

  WILKINS: It’s like you’re unwilling to see it.

  ROSALIND: (Calmly.) Dr. Wilkins, I was told—before I came to King’s—that I would be in charge of X-ray diffraction. Given that, and given the credit you seem bent on grabbing all for yourself, when you deserve none of it, I would suggest, an
d would certainly prefer, if you went back to optics and your microscopes. A field no one will begrudge you because no one really cares about it.

  WILKINS: Why are you doing this?

  ROSALIND: I simply don’t understand why you would state something, why you would tell a crowd of people, no less, that something is true when it’s not.

  WILKINS: It might be true!

  ROSALIND: It’s self-aggrandizement at the cost of any kind of integrity.

  WILKINS: You want our funding to continue, don’t you? Don’t you?

  ROSALIND: I’m just not terribly impressed by you is the thing.

  WILKINS: Oh?

  ROSALIND: You’re not…you’re just not…you don’t command my respect.

  WILKINS: That’s it.

  ROSALIND: I agree. That’s it.

  WILKINS: No one has ever spoken to me in this way. And I don’t deserve it.

  ROSALIND: Neither do I!

  (They part in opposite directions.)

  GOSLING: Neither did I! Not that that mattered.

  (The lights shift. ROSALIND is studying two prints.)

  ROSALIND: Would you look at these, Gosling.

  (GOSLING peers at the print.)

  How do you like that? I mean, how do you like that?

  (GOSLING peers some more.)

  Well?

  GOSLING: What?

  ROSALIND: Just look at them, Ray! Jesus.

  GOSLING: I see two different X-ray patterns.

  ROSALIND: Yes.

  GOSLING: One is much more diffuse than the other.

  ROSALIND: Yes!

  GOSLING: What?

  ROSALIND: Don’t you see? They’re both DNA. It exists in two forms.

  CASPAR: A form and B form. The hydrated, longer one was B, and the shorter, wider one, A…It turned out that, before, they’d been looking at one on top of the other, like… well, a man and woman making love, at that point when one body is indistinguishable from the other. It had made them virtually impossible to study. But now Rosalind had discovered how to separate man and woman, how to brush them off, get them out of bed and really see them, naked before her. This achievement alone secured her place in history.

  WATSON: (Scoffing.) Her place in history?

  CRICK: Her place in history??

  CASPAR: Well, it should have.

  GOSLING: And its significance wasn’t lost on Wilkins.

  (ROSALIND and WILKINS work with GOSLING between them.)

  WILKINS: Could you please ask Miss Franklin if she would mind terribly if I were to work with her on the A and B forms of DNA. I have some new samples and I think we should collaborate.

  GOSLING: Miss Franklin, Dr. Wilkins would like to know if you might consider—

  ROSALIND: Please tell him that I will not collaborate and I don’t appreciate his desire to infringe on my material.

  GOSLING: She says she will not collaborate—

  WILKINS: And why is that precisely?

  ROSALIND: He knows perfectly well.

  GOSLING: She says you know perfectly—

  WILKINS: My lord, what’s there to be so afraid of??

  GOSLING: He says “my lord”—

  ROSALIND: I’m not afraid of anything!

  GOSLING: She says she’s not afraid of anything!

  ROSALIND: I mean, I simply will not have my data interpreted for me!

  WILKINS: I’ve really had enough of this.

  ROSALIND: I agree.

  WILKINS: I mean, I can’t take it anymore. What’s more, your antipathy is distracting everyone in the lab.

  ROSALIND: We’ll work separately then. I’ll take the A form. And you can have B.

  WILKINS: Maybe I’d like A.

  ROSALIND: Maurice, you’re being ridiculous.

  WILKINS: Fine. B it is.

  CRICK: And so Rosalind did her work. Or tried to. Painstakingly. Paying attention to every detail. Every discrepancy.

  WATSON: You see, she was suddenly just a few steps away from the structure. But Rosalind didn’t hypothesize the way Crick and I did; she proved things, and proving things, as all scientists know, isn’t…well for one thing it isn’t fast.

  ROSALIND: Either the structure is a big helix or a smaller helix consisting of several chains. The phosphates are also clearly on the outside, and not within.

  GOSLING: Did you hear that Linus Pauling’s working on DNA again?

  ROSALIND: I didn’t.

  GOSLING: Well, he is.

  ROSALIND: Good for him.

  GOSLING: I think Wilkins wants to speed things up. Make a model. The others are making models, you know.

  ROSALIND: If you’d like to take the day off and build a model, Ray, you’re welcome to do so. I’d suggest a train, or an automobile. Those tend to reflect reality fairly well.

  CRICK: (To the audience.) You see, to Rosalind, making a model was tantamount to negligence. She needed to do all the calculations first, to sit in a dimly lit room and do the maths. So what ended up happening was that she and Wilkins both sat in separate dimly lit rooms, doing maths. Unsurprisingly—

  WATSON: Wilkins got lonely.

  WILKINS: I wasn’t at all lonely.

  WATSON: And so he’d visit his old friend Francis Crick in Cambridge. A brilliant new scientist had just joined the lab there too: me.

  CRICK: Another pint then?

  WILKINS: Oh why not.

  CRICK: Yes! Why not. This is practically a celebration! I don’t think I’ve seen you in—what—months now? You’ve been neglecting me, Maurice.

  WILKINS: I know…Tell me what you’ve been up to. Still on those hemoglobins, Francis?

  CRICK: Oh, well, actually—

  WATSON: (Leaping in to change the subject.) But we’re so enjoying hearing about your work.

  (WATSON glares at CRICK to get him to join in.)

  CRICK: (A bit reluctantly.) It’s true…we know all about our own work.

  WATSON: There’s no fun in that.

  WILKINS: It’s nice to be here; I must say.

  CRICK: She’s really that bad?

  WILKINS: Worse.

  WATSON: The Jews really can be very ornery.

  WILKINS: You’re telling me.

  WATSON: Is she quite overweight?

  WILKINS: Why do you ask?

  CRICK: James is many things but subtle is not one of them. So you must forgive him, over and over and over again.

  WATSON: You don’t need to apologize for me, Francis—

  CRICK: Oh but I do.

  WATSON: All I asked is if—

  CRICK: You see, he imagines that she’s overweight. The kind of woman who barrels over you with the force of a train.

  WATSON: Or a Mack truck.

  WILKINS: No, she’s not like that. No. She’s like…she’s like…

  (Lights on ROSALIND somewhere else on the stage; WILKINS gazes at her.)

  CASPAR: (To the audience.) To Watson and Crick, the shape of something suggested the most detailed analysis of its interior workings. As though, by looking at something you could determine how it came to be…how it gets through each day.

  WATSON: Tell us more about these recent photographs.

  WILKINS: Well, they’re getting clearer. Every day I think I see more, and then I wonder if my mind’s playing tricks on me.

  WATSON: So you really think it’s a helix?

  CRICK: Jim—

  WILKINS: The thing is, she’s keeping me from my own work. And she has all the best equipment, not to mention the best samples. She’s hoarding everything.

  WATSON: It looks like a helix, Maurice?

  WILKINS: What? Oh. Yes. A helix.

  CRICK: (Eliciting a “what are you doing??” glare from Watson.) Perhaps you should build a model.

  WATSON: Well, no need to be hasty about it.

  WILKINS: It doesn’t matter either way! She’s opposed—completely—to models. She doesn’t think there’s any way they could reflect reality at this point. Mere pointless speculation.

  CRICK: (Trying to h
elp, to nudge WILKINS.)

  But is speculation always pointless?

  WILKINS: I think as far as Rosy is concerned.

  WATSON: She doesn’t sound particularly rosy to me.

  CRICK: Does she know you all still call her that behind her back?

  WILKINS: Are you joking? She’d have us skinned.

  WATSON: I can’t wait to meet her.

  WILKINS: Oh trust me. You can wait.

  GOSLING: He didn’t have to wait long. That winter King’s held a colloquium on nucleic acid structure. I was the… well, I made coffee at the colloquium. That was my contribution. It was November 1951.

  (ROSALIND stands in a spotlight, or it’s possible that we just hear her lines—a recording, or she speaks from offstage. In this scene, WATSON and CRICK watch her, or watch a space that represents her. Their lines should run over some of hers; they’re talking over her.)

  ROSALIND: As we all know, a nucleic acid is a macromolecule composed of chains of monomeric nucleotides. This nucleic acid, which I’ll shorthand as DNA, exists in two forms. / Let’s show that slide.

  WATSON: (To CRICK.) I wonder how she would look if she took off her glasses and did something novel with her hair.

  CRICK: You may be onto something, Watson.

  ROSALIND: All right. There it is. / Look closely at it.

  WATSON: I mean, she could possibly be attractive if she took even the mildest interest in her clothes. But appearances aside, she is not…engaging.

  CRICK: I’ll grant you that.

  ROSALIND: If you examine it, you can see the transition from A form to B form / in this hydrated sample.

  WATSON: When we shook hands, her handshake was far too firm. There’s nothing gentle, nothing remotely tender about her. She’s a cipher where a woman should be. That said, she’s not fat.

  GOSLING: So busy analyzing the speaker, they didn’t hear what she was saying. That she stated quite clearly:

  ROSALIND: Based on these calculations, it’s clear that the phosphates exist on the outside of the molecule. There is no question that this is the case.

  GOSLING: And when Watson and Crick made their model a week or so later, everyone at King’s was invited up to see it—after all, it was based on our work.

  WATSON: Wilkins, what do you make of it?

  ROSALIND: Where’s the water?

  CRICK: It’s nice to see you too, Miss Franklin.

  ROSALIND: DNA absorbs at least ten times more water than that.

  WATSON: Is that right?