Photograph 51

by Anna Ziegler

ROSALIND: I don’t see how a molecule, if it’s as you’ve imagined it, could hold together.

  CRICK: How so?

  ROSALIND: The phosphates have to be on the outside. Furthermore, the X-ray data has not proven that the molecule is, indeed, helical.

  WATSON: You just don’t want to admit that it’s right.

  WILKINS: It’s not right, Watson. It would never hold together. Not like that. Perhaps if you’d told me what you were working on a few weeks ago I could have helped you with it.

  CRICK: All right, old boy—

  WILKINS: But you didn’t do that, did you? And why not? Because you knew perfectly well it wasn’t yours to ask about.

  WATSON: Maurice—

  CRICK: Be quiet, Jim. He’s right—we should have told him.

  WATSON: Why? It’s a free country, isn’t it?

  CRICK: England? No, not in the slightest.

  WATSON: Even if the model is wrong—I don’t really see what the big deal is.

  WILKINS: Then perhaps you should return to your country, where theft and burglary are upheld as virtues. In fact, it’s how America came to be, isn’t it? In Britain we don’t actually believe in turning our sinners into saints.

  WATSON: Hey, if you’re angry with George Washington, don’t take it out on me. I’m just trying to do some science here.

  ROSALIND: You call that science?

  WILKINS: Well you’re not trying in the right way…And you’re too young. And your hair…needs attention!

  WATSON: I’m not too young.

  CRICK: For my part I quite like his hair! I think it’s got character!

  CASPAR: It was a disaster. An embarrassment. The model, I mean. The Cavendish ordered Watson and Crick to stop working on DNA.

  WILKINS: An oddly satisfying disaster, wouldn’t you say, Ray?

  GOSLING: I would, Dr. Wilkins. It was oddly satisfying.

  CRICK: What condescending bastards those King’s boys can be, can’t they?

  WATSON: Boys and girl.

  CRICK: Right. I don’t know how he puts up with her. They make quite a pair. I mean I love him dearly, I do, but even at university, Wilkins could be a patronizing prat.

  WATSON: Oh come on. We’d be gloating too. If it’d been the reverse.

  CRICK: It will be, one day. There’s not a chance I’m going back to hemoglobin diffraction patterns.

  WATSON: That’s the spirit!

  CRICK: What do you mean?

  WATSON: I’ve gotten through to you: not everyone can win.

  CRICK: I don’t want to win. I just want to do the most interesting work I can get my hands on.

  WATSON: And how do we get our hands on it?

  CRICK: I don’t know.

  WATSON: No. I think you do.

  (Lights shift. ROSALIND is on the telephone.)

  ROSALIND: You really don’t have to worry about me, mother.

  I’m just fine. I always have been and nothing is different now…

  Well, tell father the work is slow-going but…

  Of course he’s busy, but so am I…

  Yes: I am managing to sleep…

  No. I’m not too lonely.

  (From offstage.)

  GOSLING: Miss Franklin!

  ROSALIND: I’ve got to go. Yes. Friday night. Goodbye.

  GOSLING: Miss Franklin!

  (She hangs up. GOSLING appears.)

  ROSALIND: What is it?

  GOSLING: You just have to see it. It’s sort of…well, amazing.

  ROSALIND: Show me.

  (He shows her. She studies it for a long time.)

  ROSALIND: Gosling.

  GOSLING: It’s incredible, isn’t it?

  ROSALIND: How do you like that. How do you like that…I’ve never seen anything like it.

  CASPAR: Photograph 51.

  WATSON: Photograph 51.

  GOSLING: It’s certainly a helix. The B form is certainly a helix.

  (A beat.)

  ROSALIND: The B form certainly looks to be a helix.

  GOSLING: Looks to be?

  ROSALIND: (To the audience.) As a girl, I prided myself on always being right. Because I was always right. I drove my family near mad by relentlessly proposing games to play that I’d win every time. Scrabble. Ludo. Hide and Seek outside until the lamplighter appeared on his bicycle and our mother called us in, out of the dusk. Eventually and unsurprisingly I lost my opponents. And when I was at university, and it was becoming as clear to my parents as it always had been for me that I would pursue science, I left Cambridge to meet my father for a hiking weekend. Atop a mountain in the Lake District, when I was eighteen years old, he said to me, “Rosalind, if you go forward with this life…you must never be wrong. In one instance, you could lose all you’ve achieved.” But I didn’t think this would be a problem. I was meticulous and I enjoyed being meticulous because I enjoyed being right. But it was in that moment that, without realizing it, a kind of fear set in, a dread around the edges of my convictions, like a hovering dusk no lamplighter ever truly dispels.

  (She looks again at the photograph, intently.)

  CASPAR: And she stood there, staring at the photograph, as though she were looking in a mirror but was suddenly unrecognizable to herself.

  CRICK: (Searchingly.) Did any chimes go off in her head? Was there any singing?

  WATSON: And then.

  (She opens a drawer and files it away.)

  WATSON: She put it away.

  GOSLING: Shouldn’t we show it to Wilkins?

  ROSALIND: Don’t you want to celebrate, Gosling? We should celebrate.

  GOSLING: It’s the clearest photo we’ve taken by a mile.

  ROSALIND: By a landslide.

  GOSLING: So…does celebrating mean taking a break from work??

  (WILKINS enters.)

  WILKINS: Celebrate what? I see no cause for celebration.

  ROSALIND: You can have a little fun, can’t you, Maurice? After all, we know how you like your games and jokes and things.

  WILKINS: Do I?

  ROSALIND: Why don’t you give us a little speech.

  WILKINS: I beg your pardon?

  ROSALIND: Go on then.

  WILKINS: A speech? About what?

  ROSALIND: Be creative, Maurice. You can do that. Come up with something out of thin air. Can’t you?…I don’t know. Why don’t you tell us about the fondest moment in your scientific career.

  WILKINS: The fondest moment.

  ROSALIND: Ray, does it seem he’s just repeating after me?

  GOSLING: Oh, um.

  WILKINS: What is it precisely you want me to do?

  ROSALIND: Just do something. Maurice. Something. You never commit to anything and it torments me.

  WILKINS: Does it.

  ROSALIND: Yes. I can’t abide it.

  GOSLING: I think Dr. Wilkins is just trying to…

  ROSALIND: Oh, come on, Ray. Whose side are you on?

  GOSLING: (Directing the first phrase to ROSALIND and the second to WILKINS in quick, seamless succession.) I’m not on a side. I’m not on a side.

  WILKINS: You’re behaving a bit like a banshee, Miss Franklin.

  ROSALIND: Just celebrate with us.

  WILKINS: But what are we celebrating??

  GOSLING: It’s amazing, really—

  ROSALIND: Have some faith in me. There is something to celebrate. Take a leap of faith.

  WILKINS: (Bitterly.) As though you would ever do that.

  (He chuckles, drily.)

  I mean, my God, can you even hear yourself? The irony?

  ROSALIND: (Slowly.) I take a leap of faith every day, Maurice, just by walking through that door in the morning. I take a leap of faith that it’ll all be worth it, that it will all ultimately mean something.

  WILKINS: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

  ROSALIND: No, you wouldn’t.

  WILKINS: You know, you really are unspeakably difficult. I’ve never encountered a woman with such temerity—

  ROSALIND: Well perhaps it�
��s that you haven’t encountered very many women.

  WILKINS: As you well know I was married!

  ROSALIND: And maybe that’s over and done with for a reason.

  WILKINS: Oh, no. No. I refuse to get into this with you—

  GOSLING: Dr. Wilkins—

  WILKINS: (Bitter and sarcastic and self-pitying, a dam bursting.) No. I refuse to disclose the depths of my wife’s cruelties to you. The lengths she took to keep me from our son; the words she said that repeat over and over in my head, like an infernal radio show that will never end. I will not get into it. I am not that kind of man. Perhaps you want to work with someone different. Someone who can happily remain in high dudgeon with you day in and day out. Well, I’m sorry—I am not that person. I’m sorry! Life is and has always been unfair. That is its enduring hallmark.

  ROSALIND: Maurice—

  WILKINS: A leap of faith. It’s almost funny…Because you would never. No—it all has to be solved and re-solved. There can be no room for error. No room for…humanity, really. That’s what you leave out of your equations, Miss Franklin.

  (He leaves.)

  GOSLING: That night I slipped Wilkins the photograph. I did think it was his right to see it. I knew it was the best photograph we had.

  CASPAR: Dr. Franklin, I graduated today!! As of this morning, I was still a student, and a mere few hours later, I’m not. I feel like one of my own X-ray exposures, one that took ages to set up and wasn’t at all promising, but managed to yield something. A little something. Really, I can’t believe it. Neither could my parents. They kept saying “Don, we thought you’d never finish.” But they were happy. And…I was happy—am happy—and I just felt like telling you that I owe all of this to you. And I was wondering…do you think…I mean, is there any chance I could come work with you—for you—at King’s? It would be a great honor. Maybe there’s a fellowship I could look into?

  ROSALIND: Dear Dr. Caspar, my most heartfelt congratulations. I’m sure you realize how important semantics are. This title that’s now been conferred on you…It means windows have been flung wide, letting in the cold night air, that streetlamps will blink on as you walk past them. In 1945, when I got my doctorate, I thought those letters you’ve now acquired would have the same value for me, but of course you and I well know this is not the case. I’m not complaining about it. One can’t focus on such things. And I don’t.

  CASPAR: You are so remarkable, Dr. Franklin. I really hope you don’t mind my saying: you are so remarkable. I don’t know how you exist in the environment in which you find yourself.

  ROSALIND: I just do my work, Dr. Caspar. I’ve realized the best thing is just to do one’s work and not worry so much about anything else. It doesn’t matter anyway.

  WATSON: But it does matter! It did matter. You can’t be in the race and ignore it at the same time! That’s where she went wrong.

  WILKINS: You told her she was remarkable?

  CASPAR: I did.

  CRICK: And what is a race anyway? And who wins? If life is the ultimate race to the finish line, then really we don’t want to win it. Shouldn’t want to win it. Should we?

  WATSON: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

  CRICK: Or maybe the race is for something else entirely. Maybe none of us really knew what we were searching for. What we wanted. Maybe success is as illusory and elusive as…well, Rosalind was to us. Maybe it exists only in our conception of it, and then always just out of reach, like Tantalus with his hovering grapes.

  WATSON: See? Gobble-de-gook. It’s amazing we got on so well for so long.

  CRICK: (Sarcastic.) It is amazing.

  (Then, softening. The tension breaks and they smile at each other.)

  WATSON: In January 1953 we got our hands on a report Pauling had written about nucleic acid structure. It was wrong; he was wrong about the phosphates, but the simple fact of his writing it meant he was working on it in earnest, which meant he would get it.

  CRICK: We all knew it was just a matter of time and not much time at that. So Watson went to London. He didn’t tell me why, but I had a feeling.

  (WATSON bursts into ROSALIND’s office.)

  WATSON: Good morning, good morning, lovely Rosalind.

  ROSALIND: What are you doing here?

  WATSON: It’s nice to see you too.

  ROSALIND: You could knock.

  WATSON: Do you know what I have with me?

  ROSALIND: How would I know?

  WATSON: Pauling’s manuscript.

  ROSALIND: All right.

  WATSON: All right?

  ROSALIND: Look, I really was about to—

  WATSON: Pauling is going to be publicly humiliated in two weeks when this gets published and you don’t even want to see it?

  ROSALIND: Why would I want to see it?

  WATSON: To gloat, for one. You should see Bragg—he’s walking on water these days; (Impersonating Bragg.) “Linus isn’t going to beat me this time!” See, Pauling made some of the same mistakes Crick and I made. He’s proposing a triple-stranded helix with the phosphates on the inside.

  ROSALIND: That’s what this rush to publish does. It means our publications are littered with ridiculous mistakes.

  WATSON: Do you think DNA is a helix?

  ROSALIND: I’m happy to arrange a time to sit down with you and discuss my findings but right now is not possible, unfortunately.

  WATSON: Maurice says you’re anti-helical.

  ROSALIND: Maurice has no business saying who or what I am.

  WATSON: So you think it is helical?

  ROSALIND: I think it might be.

  WATSON: Are you sure you’re interpreting your data correctly?

  ROSALIND: What did you just say?

  WATSON: How much theory do you have?

  (A hair of a beat.)

  ROSALIND: Why are you here, Jim?

  WATSON: (Holding up PAULING’s manuscript.) To share.

  ROSALIND: Oh, really?

  (Beat.)

  WATSON: I don’t know. I thought you’d be interested in the manuscript. I thought…

  ROSALIND: Yes?

  WATSON: I thought we could talk.

  ROSALIND: But you’ve never shown any interest in doing that before. Which leads me to believe that you’re here to insult me. That or you’re not aware of the fact that you’re insulting me, which is, perhaps, worse. Do you think that if you demoralize me I won’t get it done?

  WATSON: Get what done?

  ROSALIND: The work, Jim.

  WATSON: I think you’ll get it done. Or…I think you might get it done. But to do that, you have to compensate for the things you’re lacking. And maybe I could do that.

  ROSALIND: Do what?

  WATSON: Help you.

  ROSALIND: Really, if you wouldn’t mind leaving—

  WATSON: What I mean is, if you had theory you might understand how these “anti-helical” features in the A form are really distortions. That what you’re seeing is, in fact, a helix. Because I really think it is one, Rosalind. I have this feeling that’s divorced from reason. That I can’t explain. It’s deeper than…I mean, if I’ve known anything for sure in my life, this is it.

  ROSALIND: You must sleep so easily. With that kind of certainty.

  WATSON: No. I don’t sleep.

  (Beat.)

  There’s too much to think about. You know there is. It overwhelms you. I can see that. So share your research with me. I mean, you’re not going to get it on your own.

  ROSALIND: Get out.

  WATSON: Be reasonable, Rosalind.

  ROSALIND: Get out of my lab!

  WATSON: There’s no need to get so upset—

  ROSALIND: I’m not upset! I’m not upset. I’m…I’m…What I am is none of your concern. Just go.

  WATSON: Why won’t you even consider that—

  (ROSALIND rushes at him.)

  What’s this all about?

  ROSALIND: Out!

  WATSON: Okay, okay.

  (He leaves.)


  ROSALIND: And stay out.

  CASPAR: Down the hall, Watson was with Wilkins. Or Wilkins was with Watson. If it weren’t in poor taste, they’d have been holding hands.

  WILKINS: Don’t be absurd.

  CASPAR: I wasn’t.

  WATSON: She really is a right old hag, isn’t she? I mean, the way she lunged at me. I really thought I might get hit.

  WILKINS: A complete disaster. Did it to me once. All I was doing was trying to be congenial.

  WATSON: Me too!

  WILKINS: She takes everything so seriously.

  WATSON: One needs to be more lighthearted sometimes. Every now and then at least.

  WILKINS: I know.

  WATSON: I mean, I can’t believe this is what you’ve had to put up with. It’s really more than anyone should be asked to do.

  WILKINS: It really is.

  WATSON: It is.

  WILKINS: And it’s all such a shame.

  WATSON: What is?

  WILKINS: That we’re not actually partners. I suppose I ruined that before it even began.

  WATSON: How could you have ruined it?

  WILKINS: I was unfriendly, I suppose.

  WATSON: (Lying.) Come on. You’re one of the…friendliest men I know.

  WILKINS: I know! I mean, I am pretty friendly. I’ve never offended anyone else.

  WATSON: She must be crazy.

  WILKINS: Maybe she is. Or maybe…

  WATSON: What?

  WILKINS: I don’t know.

  WATSON: Well, you’re better off without her. Why collaborate with someone with whom it’s impossible to get along?

  WILKINS: The work, for one! I mean, you should see some of her…

  (He looks through a file in a drawer and pulls out a photograph.)

  This photograph she took of B, for instance.

  WATSON: What photograph?

  WILKINS: This one.

  (He hands it to WATSON, who studies it for a long time.)

  WATSON: I need to…

  WILKINS: What?

  WATSON: Go. I need to go.

  WILKINS: Just like that?

  (WATSON is out the door.)

  James?

  CASPAR: In The Double Helix, Watson later wrote “The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race.” It was Photograph 51.

  WILKINS: You can’t leave—just like that. James!

  GOSLING: On the train back to Cambridge, he sketched the image in the margin of a newspaper. He stared at it. He stared at it some more. When the train pulled in, he stopped for a moment to notice two warblers perched atop a station lamppost; he was sure he heard their song as he ran like a wild man down the rainy streets—and then he arrived.