Rosalind Franklin

by Brenda Maddox

  Grandpa Franklin had had two conspicuous failures in his attempt to persuade his children to marry within the faith, as his own father had succeeded in doing with all seven of his. Arthur’s eldest son, known to the family as Jack, had married an Agnes Foley at a registry office. His radical second son, Hugh (of the Churchill dogwhip incident) had twice married non-Jewish women named Elsie. The first (from whom Rosalind got her middle name) converted to Judaism before dying of the Spanish flu in 1919. The second Elsie did not convert. His father cut Hugh off with a pittance and never saw him again.

  Making his will, Arthur Franklin sought to ensure that none of his eight grandchildren would make the same mistake. In a lengthy, tortuously worded legal clause, he proclaimed:

  WHEREAS my forefathers have been steadfastly loyal to the Jewish Faith and I have to the utmost of my ability followed in their footsteps ... I EARNESTLY REQUEST my named children to uphold these principles and to inculcate them in their children and especially I trust that no descendant of mine will intermarry with a person not of the Jewish Faith or renounce Judaism or the Jewish Faith.

  Any descendant who married a non-Jew would be treated as having died unmarried within Arthur Franklin’s lifetime — that is, with no entitlement to any income from capital or property. Moreover, none of his estate was to go ‘to any person born out of wedlock’ or ‘strangers in blood to myself though adopted by a member of my family’. (Many years later, such legal ingenuity was struck down by a court ruling against testamentary attempts to rule lives from beyond the grave.)

  This wording had no practical meaning for Rosalind or her siblings, not having finished education nor entertained thoughts of marriage. But the constraints within or against which they would make their future choices were clear.

  By spring Rosalind’s thoughts had turned to the holiday she wanted to take before the May examinations — for which she felt desperately behind in her preparations, especially in physics and chemistry. She wanted to go hostelling in the Peak District, with her brother David and her second cousin Catherine Joseph (their old St Paul’s feud long forgotten). Months earlier, she had sought parental permission: ‘Please don’t just say “no” ... I know lots of people who have been on these NUS [National Union of Students] trips and they have all been very successful ... I am sure you will say next “how are you going to pay for it?”’ In anticipation of this objection, she itemised various savings, gifts and receipts which gave her nearly £50 in hand (not to mention her recent inheritance). ‘So you see I could almost pay for the whole family to go (this does not mean I intend to).’

  Planning the trip was a pleasure in itself. She was proud of her equipment — her hiking boots, her field glasses and guidebook collection — as well as of her skill at route planning and reading timetables with an eye out for the cheapest or most unusual route. She also felt glee in pointing out (in her mother’s tart memory) to the travel clerk that the information given her was wrong.

  The holiday was a temporary respite from the apprehension about exams. She still lacked confidence. However, she was not shaken by her supervisor’s report from Newnham, which included two comments: ‘she knows her work but does not always keep to the point’ and ‘she does not seem to take criticism kindly’. Both meant — Rosalind interpreted for her parents — ‘she doesn’t agree with me’.

  The exam ordeal, when it came, was worse than she had expected. Her confessional letter of 20 May 1939 makes painful reading for anyone aware of the female capacity for self-doubt:

  I have made a frightful mess of exams . . . fairly easy papers which I should have done really well. Mineralogy, which I expected to do best, was a lovely paper but I wasted the first ¾ hr completely — going about a question the wrong way, and having to do it all again later. The result was a terrific rush and a lot of bad blunders. I think I did best in maths — the one subject which doesn’t matter ... I have never done anything so badly as yesterday’s physics practical. I did ½ instead of 2 experiments — and I don’t think I can possibly get more than a third in physics now.

  Rosalind was wrong. She did not get a third, she got a first in these preliminary examinations. Her total marks, for physics, chemistry, mineralogy and maths, put her in joint second place. The way was now clear to sit part one of the Natural Science tripos the following year. You could spend three years preparing for part two, she explained to her parents, ‘if you are less intelligent’. She was highly motivated to do it in two. Only those women who got a first in part one of their tripos were allowed to go on to part two, which was considered the more important and interesting part of the university course.

  As she turned nineteen in July 1939, Rosalind still found it important to maintain the attention of Ellis and Muriel. When her parents not only visited but sent four letters and a cake, she joked, ‘Now I really feel I am being treated as I should be, and can forgive you for all the letters you have ever not written to me.’

  That summer the Franklins once again went to Norway en famille — taking all five children this time, and Nannie too, who arrived later, with Jenifer who was recovering from chickenpox. It was an ambitious undertaking when barrage balloons were floating over London, when there was talk of a possible German invasion and the children had already built their own air raid shelter in the garden of ‘5 PP’. But the Franklins crossed the North Sea anyway, for Ellis reasoned that if war broke out Jenifer would not have a chance to go abroad for many years. So off they went and found their familiar guide to lead them through their old haunts for fishing and climbing. They were in Fjaerland, with David and Rosalind planning a trek across a glacier, when news of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 24 August 1939 reached them. Ellis immediately bundled the family onto the ferry from Bergen to Newcastle. It was the next to last boat to leave.

  As Britain waited for Hitler to strike, Rosalind returned to Newnham to begin her second year. Her father at first refused to pay for it, thinking she ought to do war work; David had left Oxford after two years to join the army. But Rosalind’s mother and her Aunt Alice said they would pay instead and he relented. Cambridge was full of evacuated children and RAF servicemen, and there were queues outside all the shops. At the college, black shades had been put on bright lights because no weaker bulbs were available. To save gas, there was no toast for breakfast. Rosalind was put in charge of waking ten people when there was an air raid alert, the signal for the whole college to go into the trenches dug nearby. Fear of attack was not unreasonable as Cambridge was surrounded by airbases.

  The raids never came. The ‘phoney war’, to hard-working Rosalind, was time utterly wasted. Irritated by the meaningless ritual and constant false alarms, she sought a confrontation with Mrs Palmer, college tutor for her hall of residence (Peile Hall). Once more she won — at the price of hearing some ugly words applied to her character:

  I have just had a great triumph, though a somewhat disagreeable one. I and a few others decided it was time something was done about the . . . going out to the trenches . . . for every warning — we have had only I quite undisturbed night — yesterday the thing went at 7.30 and lasted until 11.15. I had to do some work. We were the only college being handicapped in this way — and I was getting badly behind. So three of us stayed in on the first floor and boldly left the light showing through the door. Mrs Palmer came in in a storm and turned us out, saying we were ‘disloyal, deceitful and untrustworthy’ and were to see her today. Before we saw her she had called a meeting to say that nobody need go to the trenches before 11 PM!

  Rosalind did have a lot of work to do. There was no less science to master just because there was a war on. In ‘optics’ she drew a great many diagrams of lenses and light passing through a slit, and traced the history of the subject back to Newton, Descartes and Doppler. In physics, she studied the first and the second law of thermodynamics, and read Linus Pauling’s classic text, The Nature of the Chemical Bond (explaining how electrons hold molecules together). She learned about proteins that fold
; about the infectious tobacco mosaic virus that could be extracted from a tobacco plant and crystallised in a bottle, and also about the nucleic acid contained in chromosomes. She noted the experimentally useful form of nucleic acid, sodium thymonucleate (obtained from calf thymus glands), with its high molecular weight of 800,000 (now known to be much greater) and its bases stacked up at 3.4 Ängstroms along its chains. (Bases are the opposite of acids, chemical compounds that take up the ionised hydrogen produced by acids. In the nucleic acids each base is linked to a sugar and a phosphate group, making up a nucleotide.) A sketch in her workbook represents a helical structure. She made a note to herself: ‘Geometrical basis for inheritance?’

  Getting deeper into crystallography, which would become her expertise, she joined the small band of the human race for whom infinitesimal specks of matter are as real and solid as billiard balls. She easily met the first requirement of the profession, the ability to think in three dimensions. The ‘Ängstrom’ (named after the nineteenth-century Swedish physicist Anders J. Ångström) was now part of her working vocabulary as the unit for measuring extremely short lengths. One Ängstrom represents a hundred- millionth of a centimetre.

  After Lawrence Bragg, crystallography was developed further at Cambridge in the 1930s by the brilliant and ebullient J.D. Bernal, who refined the nineteenth-century classification of ‘space groups’ — the 230 forms into which the seven recognised crystal systems are organised. Rosalind made notes on ‘Methods of approaching structure from space group’, which included the observation that ‘A molecule which is long or flat may in general be entirely contained within a space having the same size and shape as the unit cell of the crystal.’ She drew diagrams of all types, and noted: ‘Monoclinic all face centred.’

  She understood very well what is easily confused by an outsider — that the marks appearing on a photographic plate were not of the atoms themselves inside the crystal, but rather of the spots that X-rays make when scattered by hitting the atoms. The spots vary in intensity as the X-rays reinforce each other in some directions and cancel each other out in others. From the position and the intensity of the spots, the atomic structure of the crystal may be guessed at. She learned also about the best angles from which to aim X-rays for efficient diffraction, and how to rotate the crystal to take photographs from many angles. ‘Absorption of X-rays depends only on number and kind of atoms present,’ she reminded herself in clear handwriting.

  Rosalind’s undergraduate notebook headed ‘Crystal Physics’ shows her learning the space groups and properties of various crystal forms.

  Away from the lab she experimented with cooking in her room, from the meagre ingredients available. One supper shared with a friend was composed of fried eggs, fried mushrooms, fried potatoes and fried crumpets. Another day she went into a fruit shop and saw ‘“white things looking like eggs” and was told they were and I could have four! I had lots of spare marg’, so we had real fried eggs with bits of fried bread for Sunday supper, a feast which it is still quite a great pleasure to look back on.’ She also dabbled in politics and worked on the election campaign for Dr John Ryle, Regius Professor of Physic (i.e., of medicine, not physics), who in February 1940 was standing as the Independent candidate for the university’s parliamentary seat.

  The war was pushing women to the centre of academic and industrial life. The proportion of women at the university had increased, as the total undergraduate numbers of men and women shrank from 5,491 men and 513 women in 1938 to 2,908 men and 497 women in 1940. There were Girton and Newnham graduates in almost every government department — in military intelligence, in signalling and code-breaking, in anthropology, archaeology, map reading, mechanical engineering. Indeed, one of the social features most sharply distinguishing Britain from Germany, the Newnham historian Gillian Sutherland has observed, was the participation of women in the war effort. It was not unreasonable of Rosalind to dream of a challenging job once she had completed her third year.

  She followed closely the progress of the war, which by January 1940 had enveloped the Finns, who were first bombarded by the Soviet Union, then invaded. When a British naval ship near the coast of neutral Norway attacked the German prison ship the Altmark and freed nearly 300 British seamen prisoners, Rosalind declared to her parents that Britain had lost its moral advantage, giving enormous opportunities for enemy propaganda. Her father reproached her for such an unpatriotic opinion. She shot back: ‘I am not one of the people who always says England is wrong.’ She thought it was almost as bad to say that England could never be wrong — a provocative opinion that she hoped did not mean ‘that the reply will again have to occupy 2 pages of Father’s letter and so have room for nothing else’.

  By the spring of 1940 the war was phoney no longer. The Nazis invaded Denmark and Norway, then Holland. The Dutch surrender after six days provoked another father-daughter skirmish. Rosalind wrote Ellis:

  I don’t understand your remarks about Holland. It doesn’t seem ‘weak-kneed’ to give in after they had lost % of their country, all their air force . . . and about to lose the rest and many civilians as well. You didn’t say that about Finland and the Finnish losses in 3 mo[nth]s were less than the Dutch losses in a few days. It is obviously all we can do to save Belgium.

  When Belgium surrendered, however, Rosalind was furious. She wondered if King Leopold had the constitutional right to do what he had done and wondered if ‘our King’ could do the same?

  Her preparations for the all-important part one of the tripos coincided with the grimmest news of the war so far. German armies were poised to push down into France and turn west towards the English Channel. The fall of Paris was imminent and the British Expeditionary Force on the Continent had withdrawn to the beach at Dunkirk. On 10 May the House of Commons forced Chamberlain to resign and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister over a national government.

  Rosalind disagreed with her father’s faith that common sense and right would triumph. Common sense, she argued, would say that ‘we are being beaten . . . Incidentally, America is not likely to let us lose though she seems willing to let us come very near it.’

  Her personal outlook was also gloomy: ‘Exams begin on Saturday. I wish I could manage to work 10 or 11 hours a day like most people do now but I can’t.’ She was cutting her laboratory sessions in order to revise and did nothing but work, sleep and play a little tennis in the long evenings created by ‘Double Summertime’. As she got into the exams, she felt she hadn’t ‘got a scrap of brain left . . . I have never doubted that I shan’t fall below a Second but I wanted a First and don’t think there’s any hope of that now.’

  In ten days between the end of May and early June, over a third of a million British and Allied troops were evacuated from Dunkirk. On 4 June Churchill gave his ‘We shall fight on the beaches . . . we shall never surrender’ speech. On 19 June, as he broadcast the news of the fall of France, Rosalind was back in London, listening to the BBC while helping her mother sort out clothes for refugees at the Women’s Volunteer Service in Eaton Square. Once again her pessimism had been unnecessary. She had got a first in part one of the Natural Science tripos, and won a college exhibition scholarship — £15 — for her final year.

  If, as seemed possible, Cambridge might close down before the autumn term, Rosalind thought she might get work as a chemist. To have passed part one of the tripos was the equivalent of a degree. Her father suggested some form of ‘land work’ — agricultural labour — but she rejected it out of hand. She would be ‘quite exceptionally bad’ at anything except science. This flat declaration prompted Ellis to accuse her of being interested in nothing but science — in fact, of making science her religion. In a sense, he was right. Rosalind sent him an eloquent four-page declaration whose length testifies to his centrality in her life:

  You frequently state, and in your letter you imply, that I have developed a completely one-sided outlook and look at everything and think of everything in terms of science. Obviously my method of
thought and reasoning is influenced by a scientific training — if that were not so my scientific training will have been a waste and a failure. But you look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralising invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment. Your theories are those which you and many other people find easiest and pleasantest to believe, but so far as I can see, they have no foundation other than they lead to a pleasanter view of life (and an exaggerated idea of our own importance) . . .

  I agree that faith is essential to success in life (success of any sort) but I do not accept your definition of faith, i.e. belief in life after death. In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall come nearer to success and that success in our aims (the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future) is worth attaining. Anyone able to believe in all that religion implies obviously must have such faith, but I maintain that faith in this world is perfectly possible without faith in another world . . .

  It has just occurred to me that you may raise the question of a creator. A creator of what? . . . I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our insignificant race in a tiny corner of the universe, and still less in us, as still more insignificant individuals. Again, I see no reason why the belief that we are insignificant or fortuitous should lessen our faith — as I have defined it.