That is where things stood when Rosalind Franklin arrived at King’s College London on 5 January 1951. Leaving coal research to work on DNA, moving from the crystal structure of inanimate substances to that of biological molecules, she had crossed the border between non-living and living. Coal does not make more coal, but genes make more genes.
NINE
Joining the Circus
(January - May 1951)
A CELLAR IN THE STRAND was an unlikely place to look for the secret of life. But the subterranean setting was all too appropriate for what has been called one of the great personal quarrels in the history of science.
In 1951 the contrast between Paris, which had escaped the attentions of the Luftwaffe, and London which had not, was all too apparent. The main quadrangle at King’s College London, stretched between the Aldwych and the Thames Embankment, was occupied by a bomb crater 58 feet long and 27 feet deep. The biophysics unit in the basement wound round the pit, which was being excavated to build the new physics department. The South Bank seen from across the Thames was simply piles of rubble. London was depressing, at its bleakest since the outbreak of war, with bomb sites used as car parks, cracked buildings propped up by wooden buttresses and makeshift housing everywhere. Six years after the war’s end, food was still rationed, and sallow faces showed the effects of years of privation. Menus offering ‘meat and two veg’ delivered a plate of beige mutton and two forms of overcooked potato. The Welfare State that Rosalind had so admired from France was fraying round the edges. An economic crisis brought on by the onset of the Korean War had, among other things, ended the free spectacles and false teeth offered by the new National Health Service, and in the general election of February 1950 the Labour government’s post-war majority of 146 fell to a mere 5.
The contrasting genders often attributed to Paris and London were visibly true. London was a man’s city, a place of furled umbrellas, bowler hats, men’s clubs and gentlemen’s tailors: to the expatriate writer Jean Rhys, it was ‘patriarchy personified’. So it was for Rosalind. In Paris she was confident, admired, independent. Now she was a daughter again. At first she lived at home with her parents at their new home in north London, then moved to the flat in South Kensington secured by Ellis Franklin’s business connections. Dutifully but not unwillingly, she crossed London to her parents’ Friday night dinners where the arguments flared as before. Rosalind’s intolerance of her father’s conservative views, her mother decided, stemmed from associates in France who had been in the French Resistance, ‘many of them politically embittered Communists’.
Rosalind was thus in a state of glum apprehension when a graduate student at King’s, whose wife had worked with her at BCURA, volunteered to show her around the college. John Bradley found her tense and unbending, reluctant to be introduced. Clutching her aversion to things English around her like a cloak, she looked for, and found, mediocrity.
One element in English life unmentioned in her foreboding letters from France was class. At the start of the 1950s the social divisions were almost as pre-war. The Angry Young Men had not yet been heard from. Not until 1956 would My Fair Lady inform a popular audience that ‘every time an Englishman speaks, he makes another Englishman despise him’. Rosalind’s quick, clipped voice carried a class label.
The impression she made on Dr Jean Hanson, for example, the biophysics unit’s senior biologist was ‘typically upper-class — a product of the best girls’ schools’:
if you are English you feel it about another person. I always supposed her family was rich, though she never talked about it — she really stood out very much around here where most of the other people with very few exceptions came from ordinary backgrounds, middle-class or in some cases, I sup-pose, lower than that. Really, the word is aristocratic — she looked like an aristocrat and she acted like one . . . just the way she spoke, there were people at that time who sneered at the upper-class way of speaking, and really hated it.
The accent divide cut both ways. King’s, part of the ill-coordinated University of London, was no Oxbridge college. Its corridors echoed with something less than Received Pronunciation. To Rosalind, the voices signalled that she had got herself among the intellectually second rate.
There was nothing second rate about King’s tradition in laboratory science. The college had appointed its first professor of natural and experimental philosophy in 1831, long before Oxford established the Clarendon Laboratory or Cambridge the Cavendish. In 1834 Charles Wheatstone, King’s first professor of experimental philosophy, laid down iron and copper wires in the vaults for experiments in electricity. In 1860, James Clerk Maxwell was appointed professor of natural philosophy and proved that electricity and magnetism are aspects of the same phenomenon.
But science at King’s had always breathed ecclesiastical air. Theology was its biggest department. With 400 students training for the Anglican priesthood, there were swirling cassocks and dog collars everywhere. The college was established in 1829 by the Church of England as a protest against the opening of University College London, the ‘Godless Institute of Gower Street’. UCL, founded by dissenters, was denied a royal charter because it admitted Roman Catholics, Jews and other non-Anglicans. King’s, in conspicuous contrast, boasted a large chapel with vaulted ceiling (and later designs by George Gilbert Scott), the only consecrated building in the University of London. The sound of hymns from morning service rang in the ears of the scientists as they made their way along the flagged passages and down the stone stairways, past a door marked ‘Professor of Dogmatic Theology’, to their labs in the basement.
Rosalind soon was informed that women were not allowed in the King’s senior common room where some of the staff ate lunch.
With happy memories of the Labo Central’s disputatious déjeuners at Chez Solange, she felt angry and excluded. It seemed as if her work was not going to be taken seriously. But she ought not to have been surprised. It was hardly a unique arrangement in London at the time, certainly not in a bastion of the Established Church. Women were still not employed at Keyser’s bank. Even free-thinking University College, the first to admit women with full status, had one common room for men only, and a separate, joint, common room — for men and women; known familiarly as ‘the joint’, it survived well into the 1960s; UCL women, when polled, chose to retain the status quo.
Like UCL, King’s had two dining rooms, one for men and women, the other for men only, both served from the same kitchen. Many of the men preferred to eat in the communal dining room, overlooking the Thames, and some of the scientists refused to go at all into the male preserve because of the preponderance of ‘hooded crows’ (clerics).
There was yet another element at King’s foreign to Rosalind. The biophysics unit included a number of ex-military men who had come to King’s for an intensive two-year undergraduate course, and who remained on, working together as a team. They had a tough, ferocious approach to work and play — a barracks- room, beer-drinking camaraderie that spilled over after hours into Finch’s pub on the Strand.
In short, an upper-middle-class Anglo-Jewish woman with French tastes in serious discourse suddenly found herself in an environment friendly to everything she was not. Adjustment was not helped by a mournful postcard from the Faculté des Sciences de l’Universite de Paris, Laboratoire de Minéralogie: ‘Chère Mademoiselle, Nous regrettons tous à Paris votre départ.’
On 8 January 1951, J.T. Randall, FRS, called a meeting in his office to introduce Rosalind and discuss the way ahead. Present were three of the people he had mentioned in his letter changing Rosalind’s direction of research. Most important to her was Raymond Gosling, a young doctoral student, the only one at King’s using X-ray diffraction, and now assigned to assist her. Gosling joked that he was ‘the PhD slave boy handed over in chains’.
Gosling liked jokes. Young, endomorphic, good-natured, he referred to Randall as ‘JT’, ‘the Old Man’ or ‘King John’. Nonetheless, he saw the boss as a visionary genius and considered h
imself lucky, a product of University College Medical School, to get into Randall’s sought-after biophysics unit. Gosling had heard that Rosalind was pretty high-powered. Now he could see that she had ‘beautiful dark eyes, shining black hair, an intensity about her, and an awkwardness in conversation’.
Also present was the physicist and mathematician Alec Stokes who Randall had said wished ‘to concern himself almost entirely with theoretical problems’. There too was the ‘graduate from Syracuse, Mrs Heller’. Louise Heller was working as a volunteer at King’s while her husband studied in London on a Fulbright scholarship. She too formed a strong impression of the new arrival: ‘very attractive, very bright, very impatient and very opinionated’.
More important was who was not there. Maurice Wilkins, Randall’s deputy, assistant director of the biophysics unit, was on holiday. Wilkins had been working intensively on nucleic acids at King’s for several years. If Gosling was anybody’s slave, it was his. Together they had mounted a bundle of nucleic acid fibres on a wire frame (the ‘frame’ being a bent paperclip stuck in a holder), then kept the sample moist by passing saturated hydrogen through their Raymax tube and Unicam camera. When warned by Randall that air might leak into the camera (spoiling the vacuum necessary to prevent the X-ray beam diffusing), they sealed it with a condom. The result was what Randall had described to Rosalind in the crucial letter:
Gosling, working in conjunction with Wilkins, has already found that fibres of desoxyribose nucleic acid derived from material provided by Professor Signer of Berne give remarkably good fibre diagrams.
Gosling’s photographs were more than remarkable, they were unique. The spots forming an x-shape were the first clear indication that deoxyribonucleic acid — DNA — had a crystalline structure. When Wilkins showed Gosling’s measurement of the spots to Stokes, what struck Stokes were the blank spaces along the length of the ‘x’. Might the molecule, he speculated, have the shape of a helix?
Wilkins believed he was instrumental in getting Rosalind assigned to DNA. When he heard from Randall that she was coming to work on proteins in solution, he thought it a waste as they were getting such good results on nucleic acids. Considering her X-ray expertise, why not, he suggested, ‘grab her and get her in on the DNA work’? To his surprise, Randall readily agreed. Randall usually hemmed and hawed over such decisions. With new equipment on the way, Maurice had looked forward to her joining his team.
King’s had been using an X-ray machine loaned by the British Admiralty. When the Admiralty wanted it back, Wilkins and Gosling went to Birkbeck and asked to buy the new fine-focus tube that Werner Ehrenberg and Walter Spear had invented to concentrate X-rays into a very narrow beam. Ehrenberg generously gave them the prototype instead. This tube, when fitted with a very small camera, made it easier to control the humidity inside the camera. The way was now open to photographing a single DNA fibre one-tenth of a millimetre across.
Rosalind’s first task was to complete and try out the new apparatus and to order more. With brisk know-how and an array of smart-looking catalogues, she ordered equipment from Paris, adeptly haggling in French about price and specifications, and an English-made vacuum pump to extract air from the camera. With Gosling she set about designing a tilting microcamera to be made by King’s workshops.
At the same time Randall encouraged her to write up her Paris work. Within a few weeks an extensive paper was on its way to the Proceedings of the Royal Society, with his endorsement: ‘communicated by J.T. Randall, FRS’. Publication in this distinguished journal was another first for Rosalind. It gave her the opportunity to expound on the subject on which she was now a world authority: the two distinct classes of carbons and the way that each formed crystals. With two more papers on their way to publication in Acta Crystallographica, she had, at the age of thirty, an impressive representation in what the scientific profession respects as ‘peer-reviewed journals’.
If anyone at King’s was class-conscious, it was John Turton Randall. A short, bald, dapper Lancastrian, the son of a market gardener, he was a grammar-school boy who had worked his way from a county school to the University of Manchester where he led his year and took a first-class degree in crystal physics. When, somewhat to his dismay, he was steered by the Nobel Laureate Lawrence Bragg, then head of physics at Manchester, into industry rather than pursuit of a doctorate, he rose to become head of research at the General Electric Company based in Wembley. Yet he remained self-conscious about the ‘rough edges’ of his northern ways and the difficulties in becoming ‘fully acceptable in the smoother south’. In 1937 he was given a fellowship and invited to the University of Birmingham where he set up a luminescence laboratory. In 1939 he shifted to the problem of increasing the power of radar.
Randall was — and knew he was — something of a war hero. His invention (with H.A.H. Boot) of the cavity magnetron, a device to create a powerful beam of low frequency electromagnetic waves which made possible the detection of distant objects. This invention was an invaluable aid to bombing at night and in overcast conditions, and was critically important in hunting down German submarines in the Battle of the Atlantic. President Franklin Roosevelt called the cavity magnetron ‘the most valuable cargo ever to reach these shores’.
It was certainly valuable for Randall. Well before the war was won, he put in his claim to the Royal Commission on Rewards for Inventors for inventions which had served the national good. He pursued his bounty assiduously over the next few years as he moved from Birmingham to St Andrews in Scotland, where he held the chair of Natural Philosophy. He even managed to secure tax relief and compensation for legal expenses incurred before finally collecting, in 1949, his one-third share of £36,000. (J. Sayres, another Birmingham researcher, and H.A.H. Boot each also got a third.) Randall thus became financially independent beyond dreams of ordinary academics.
The biophysics unit at King’s could be seen as another form of reward from a grateful nation. Randall wished, post-war, to apply the techniques of physics to large molecules of biological importance. Endorsement for the unit’s formation came from the Royal Society, but the actual money was provided by the Medical Research Council. The MRC, which was to loom large in his life, encouraged him to move down from remote St Andrews to the livelier environment of King’s College London, where he set about gathering his staff. For his project, the MRC gave him £22,000 — a generous nest-egg much resented by some others in other King’s departments, struggling under limited budgets.
One of Randall’s first recruits was Maurice Wilkins, a Cambridge graduate, who had been with him at St Andrews and Birmingham. Wilkins had spent much of the war in Berkeley, California at the Livermore Laboratory, working on the Manhattan Project. After the war, he read Schro dinger’s What Is Life? and moved his interest to the molecules controlling living processes. For Wilkins the shift to biophysics was a change from a dry science to a wet one. When he recoiled from one of Randall’s experiments — cooling horse blood in liquid air to obtain an absorption spectrum — Randall reminded him that the great Michael Faraday had once put a beef steak between the poles of his magnet.
At the only physics department in Britain to have a major research interest in biophysics, Randall and Wilkins were the king and crown prince, but Randall wore a triple crown. He was at one and the same time: Wheatstone Professor of Physics, head of the physics department, and honorary director of the Medical Research Council biophysics research unit within the physics department. Randall was good — shockingly good, some felt — at snaring people on all sorts of grants and fellowships, which got his motley assembly of talent the name ‘Randall’s Circus’. He was less good at delineating their responsibilities once he got them. He preferred to communicate by notes on pink or white paper, and he was manipulative, not above playing people off against each other.
A bit of a showman, he wore dandyish American-made suits, a bow tie and a fresh flower in his buttonhole every day and cherished a rubber plant kept in his office. (It was suggested that hi
s interest in applying physics to biology derived from the love of plants acquired in his father’s nursery.) At the same time, he was, in Wilkins’s view, ‘tough as old leather — a Napoleon who sat at a big desk and liked to see people falter as they approached it’.
Randall was unusual for his time for the prominence he gave to women scientists. When Rosalind came to King’s, eight out of thirty-one of the biophysics staff were women, several in quite high positions. Dr Honor Fell (later Dame) was Senior Biological Adviser to the unit, coming once a week from Cambridge where she was director of the Strangeways Laboratory. Dr Jean Hanson (who became FRS in 1967), was working on muscle and took the main responsibility for the biological side of the work. Dr Marjorie M’Ewen, a lecturer in physics, was another recruit from St Andrews. At least half a dozen others were active in research, not to mention the laboratory photographer Freda Ticehurst, whom Randall had recruited personally from his old lab at GEC, and who worshipped the ground he walked on.
In the early 1950s women engaged in scientific research were still a rarity, regarded much as Dr Johnson, two centuries earlier, living in a house not far from King’s, dismissed a woman’s preaching as like ‘a dog’s walking on its hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.’ Women scientists almost never won a Nobel prize: at that time there had been only three, two of them Curies, mother and daughter. The Royal Society had by 1951 admitted only seven as Fellows — less than I per cent of the total. (The percentage would remain below four for the rest of the century.)
Of all the sciences, moreover, physics was, as it has remained, the most male-dominated. The science historian Margaret Wertheim in 1995 dubbed it ‘the priesthood of science’. In her interpretation, the persistent cultural and psychological barriers to the entry of women into physics are a legacy of ancient religious tradition: the physicist or mathematician was a kind of priest, a conduit to God the divine mathematician. Physics departments in the egalitarian United States were scarcely more welcoming to women than they were in Europe. Harvard University’s physics department in the 1950s, maintained a policy against the hiring of women even as instructors — a ban that endured for a further two decades. (No woman professor gained tenure in physics until 1992.) Princeton was worse. In the 1950s not only were women forbidden to teach physics, they were not allowed into the physics building. They were, the head of the department believed, a distraction. A female nuclear physicist invited to Princeton to use the cyclotron had to creep in under cover of darkness.
Rosalind Franklin Page 14