Randall’s lab offered a strong contrast to this misogyny. Not only did he have many women on his staff, but they tended to find him as an employer sympathetic and helpful. Himself married, with an invalid wife, Randall liked women around him, and rumours persist of a personal attachment to one of his staff. He also enjoyed social life, and liked to see his flock, men and women, come together for morning coffee, and at lunch in the joint dining room where he ate with them nearly every day. Above all, there was afternoon tea: ‘a command performance’, Louise Heller recalled. Another command performance was the annual departmental cricket match, with Randall, a cricket fiend, donning flannels and pads to bat for biophysics.
When Maurice Wilkins got back to King’s in January 1951, he got his first look at Rosalind. She was sitting at a desk in a small office and when she turned round he, like Gosling, was first struck by her eyes — ‘steady watchful dark eyes’. He found her ‘quietly handsome’ and exuding such confidence that when she stood up, he was surprised to see that she was not as tall as he had thought.
During the next few months they worked on DNA separately but cordially. She wrote up her Paris work for what seemed to him a long time but he did not bother her. He continued to look through microscopes to watch how DNA fibres swelled and lengthened as they absorbed water. He discussed with her a paper he was preparing on extensible molecules and included her in his acknowledgements.
He was wary of her peremptory manner. Once when he stood at the doorway talking, without turning in her chair she indicated with a wave of her hand that he should come in and sit down. Yet they occasionally lunched together on a Saturday at the Strand Palace Hotel, where those who had come into the lab — mainly those who were single — went for the buffet, which was inexpensive and good. Conversation was not difficult. Rosalind was interested in theatre, books and politics. Like him, she was a New Statesman devotee and, with Britain joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, she advocated neutrality in the Cold War. Both of them disliked intensely the idea of science for profit. Occasionally what Wilkins called ‘spikiness’ would show. One Saturday as they ate fruit salad with cream, he remarked that the cream had been good. ‘But it was not real cream,’ Rosalind corrected him. Wilkins felt rebuked. Not having lived in Paris in the post-war years, he had obviously forgotten what real cream tasted like.
In mid-century, despite O.T. Avery’s discovery at the Rockefeller Institute in 1944, it was by no means generally accepted that the nucleic acid DNA was the genetic material. Many scientists still believed that genes were made of protein. Wilkins, for his part, had picked on the molecular structure of the gene for its intrinsic interest, seeing it as the most rewarding problem to attack as he moved into biology. Before long, however, he and his colleagues received important advice from a colleague who had worked in New York: ‘trust Avery’.
By 1951 King’s had made good progress towards figuring out the structure of DNA. Randall said so himself. In a lecture to the Royal Society on 1 February, he began by asking that his new unit not be ‘judged too severely’ in comparison with much longer-established institutions, alluding to its apparently slow start.
In his talk, titled ‘An Experiment in Biophysics’, Randall outlined with some pride a varied programme of investigation into the nature of the cell by all optical techniques, by a research staff of twenty-six, including one Turner and Newall Fellow (i.e., Rosalind). In discussing his unit’s advances in nucleic acids, he generously gave credit to work done in London at Birkbeck. Sven Furberg, a young Norwegian researcher there on a British Council scholarship, had woken them all up to an error in the pre-war X-ray work of Astbury of Leeds. In a model he had built of the nucleic acid, Furberg showed that the sugars were at right angles to — not parallel with — the bases stacked like pennies.
At the same time Randall paid tribute also to the sample of DNA they were working on at King’s — the gel supplied by Professor Signer of Berne. When Wilkins and others had wetted this gel, they had drawn fibres that could be extended to double their original length — a process called ‘necking’ — and then shrunk back again.
Randall alerted his audience to the audacity of his attempt to map the living cell. The congestion and disorder of the King’s College site, he said, was a good symbol for biophysics: ‘This breaking down of the mental and physical boundaries associated with workers of highly different training and tradition is a necessary beginning to successful research in a borderline field.’
The words of a pompous pioneer, perhaps, but what was the point of modesty? Had he not helped win the war?
Rosalind was working without benefit of academic appointment or rank. Like a distinguished refugee arriving in a new country without baggage or reputation, she had entered a field in which the quality of her previous work was largely unknown except to the two professors, Randall and Coulson. Wilkins did not appreciate how senior she had been in Paris. Her other colleagues certainly did not. Holes in coal, or the lack thereof, were of little interest to a biophysicist.
The people she found most congenial were two women junior to herself: a young Austrian, Marianne Friedlander, and Freda Ticehurst, who ran the photographic laboratory which developed and printed the X-ray films the scientists took. Freda, an excellent technician, was warm, fun, and motherly. She was also mothered by everybody, for she had lost her fiancé during the war. Randall certainly did when, in September 1950, on the pretext of borrowing some slides, he had returned to his old GEC lab at Wembley, and invited her to come to King’s to equip and run the photographic laboratory.
Freda’s darkroom was a refuge for the entire lab. Randall himself often stopped by for a chat. Rosalind too would come in for a break, particularly on the first day of her menstrual period when she suffered from severe cramps. She would be given an aspirin and a hot drink. But sympathy was not what she wanted. Her reaction was ‘Oh well. I just have to put up with it.’ Freda sympathised with Ray Gosling too, at those times of Rosalind’s month.
Rosalind’s craving for foreign friends in London was rewarded when she met Simon and Bocha Altmann from Argentina. Simon Altmann, a Jewish refugee to South America during the war, was a friend of Vittorio Luzzati’s; they had been students together at the University of Buenos Aires. Altmann had come to King’s from Argentina as a graduate student in theoretical physics; his wife Bocha, a biochemist, was a British Council fellow at University College.
Altmann was appalled to see the predicament in which Rosalind found herself. Coulson, his own professor in theoretical physics, himself a reluctant recruit from Oxford (to which he would soon return), kept his distance from the macho rowdies in ‘Experimental’. To Altmann, it was little short of a tragedy that someone of Rosalind’s sensitivity and ability should be in an atmosphere so utterly alien to her. ‘Very well read in two languages, she was used to a civilised intellectual life, discussing painting, poetry, theatre and existentialism,’ he said. Now she found herself among people who had never heard of Sartre, whose chief reading was the Evening Standard, and who enjoyed ‘the type of girls that would get drunk at departmental parties and be passed from lap to lap having their bra undone’. People at the lab knew about Rosalind’s friendship with Luzzati and thought he was her lover. Altmann knew he was not.
Altmann felt that Rosalind, with five years of distinguished post-doctoral work to her credit, was undervalued by all at King’s, not least by Randall. The personal antipathy between her and Wilkins was just a part of the problem.
The bright spot in Rosalind’s London life was her new flat on Drayton Gardens in South Kensington. Modestly furnished, it looked luxurious to her friends most of whom lived in cramped quarters with shared bathrooms or kitchens. Four rooms on the fourth floor of a purpose-built, 1930s block, Donovan Court, it was around the corner from the Fulham Road and the Forum Cinema, and was approached by a lift and a quiet, wide hallway. Windows at the back looked out at the streetlamps of the paved walkway, Thistle Grove.
Rosalind loved
the flat, the first real home of her own. She made her own curtains and pressed friends to use the place when she was away. Her American friend from Paris, Anne Sayre, claimed credit for persuading Rosalind to dip into her personal capital for her own comfort, abandoning her usual self-denying ordinance to live only on her wages. Penny-pinching had made some sense in Paris, Anne argued, when currency restrictions forbade the import of funds. But for anyone who was not genuinely hard-up (as Anne felt she and her husband were), it was self-indulgence to economise from choice rather than necessity. To Anne’s amazement, Rosalind ‘not only took my lecture meekly but proceeded to take the flat, and to use — though always sparingly — the private income she had always previously scorned’.
Just as she was a serious scientist and serious walker, Rosalind was a serious cook. A decent kitchen all to herself gave her the opportunity to entertain as had not been possible before. She gave many dinner parties and, cooking being a branch of chemistry, was very good at it. She introduced her English guests to French cuisine with the same missionary air with which Elizabeth David’s highly popular book Mediterranean Cooking was preaching the virtues of olive oil, garlic, parmesan and basil to enliven the dreary national diet.
Rosalind served her London friends unaccustomed foods such as pigeon, rabbit and artichokes. She also instructed them in the arts of the French kitchen. How to tell whether a Camembert is ripe? Press one finger on the cheese and the other to the closed eyelid; if the consistency matches, the cheese is ready. Potatoes taste better cooked without water. Put them in butter in a heavy pan, cover and cook them in their own juices. She adored putting garlic in things, especially when her father came to dinner. Ellis Franklin who always insisted he hated it never recognised it in his favourite dish, roast beef.
Those lucky enough to be invited for a meal met the other Rosalind: not the one from the lab where she was ‘someone who kept to herself’ and who never smiled, but rather the amusing conversationalist and attentive hostess. Not so much Jekyll and Hyde as sol y sombra. To an extraordinary degree Rosalind compartmentalised parts of herself. Those who saw one side rarely saw the other.
Her guests often included members of her family, such as her aunt Alice Franklin who lived nearby at Elm Park Gardens and to whom Rosalind was close — perhaps, her cousin Ursula thought, because Alice did not get on with Ellis. ‘Is it your turn or mine to be favourite niece this week?’ she would ask Ursula. The Altmanns were frequent guests; younger members of the biophysics unit were also favoured with a meal: Louise Heller and her husband, Raymond Gosling, and Freda Ticehurst who could see Gosling’s awkward position, caught between Rosalind and Wilkins.
Of all the ‘what might have beens’ surrounding the quest for the structure of DNA, Rosalind’s failure to invite Maurice Wilkins to dinner at her flat deserves a high place on the list.
TEN
Such a Funny Lab
(May - December 1951)
WHEN SPRING COMES, says Chaucer, ‘Thanne longen folk to goon pilgrimages.’ In science these are called conferences. Especially in the early 1950s, with currency restrictions severe and salaries small, the chance to attend, expenses paid, a conference abroad was a conspicuous sign of status and carried a glamour hard to recapture in a jet-weary age. At that time the Medical Research Council’s annual report listed the foreign visits made by members of its research establishments during the preceding year as if these were scientific achievements in themselves. In May 1951, Wilkins thus was happy to stand in for Randall at a conference on large molecules being held at the Marine Biological Station in Naples.
At Naples, Wilkins spelled out very plainly for his international audience the reason for the concentration on nucleic acid at King’s. When living matter is prepared in crystal form, he said, the arrangement of its molecules can be seen and may lead to an understanding of the structure of the gene. He then put a slide on the screen. No one had ever shown such a sharp discrete set of reflections from the DNA molecule. There was nothing like it in the literature. William Astbury from Leeds, who was in the audience, congratulated Wilkins at the end for this expansion of his own studies. Astbury, an unpersuasive man working at an unfashionable northern university, had not been able to match Randall’s post-war knack of attracting government research money.
Also in the audience at Naples was Dr James Watson — the ‘Dr’ being particularly remarkable as he was only twenty-three. He had entered the University of Chicago in 1943 at the age of fifteen. When he was seventeen, in the university biology library, he too had read Schro dinger’s What Is Life?, and changed his own life. He determined to learn what the gene was. Reorienting himself to genetics, he went for his doctoral studies to the University of Indiana; here the Italian microbiologist Salvador Luria brought him into the elite circle under the legendary Max Delbrück to study bacterial viruses. This line of research won Watson a postdoctoral fellowship to Copenhagen to work with the biochemist Herman Kalckar.
As he had heard of neither J.T. Randall nor Maurice Wilkins, young Watson was not disturbed by the common phenomenon of a last-minute replacement for a well-known name on a conference programme. The subject — nucleic acids — was what had drawn him to Naples. He listened eagerly to Wilkins’s report that the nucleic acid, DNA, could be prepared in crystal form (as not all large molecules can). Crystalline DNA, as Wilkins was arguing, then could be subjected to X-ray diffraction and thus its three-dimensional structure might be deduced.
Watson believed — with a single-mindedness unavailable to the war-weary heads around him — that the gene was the thing to study. However, he feared that it might be, in his words, ‘fantastically irregular’ in shape. The clear pattern of Wilkins’s slide demonstrated to him there was a regular structure waiting to be mapped. (Genes should not be equated with DNA; they are made of DNA, but not all DNA molecules are genes.) By understanding the structure of the molecule DNA, Watson hoped to understand how the gene did its work of replication.
Watson was a self-propelling young man who had achieved a modicum of adolescent fame on The Quiz Kids, a national radio show. His protruding eyes gave the look of being ready to pounce, and he pounced on Wilkins. Very conscious of his own bachelor state, he gathered that Wilkins was an unattached male. When he saw his pretty sister Elizabeth, who had come to Naples with him, eating lunch with Wilkins, Watson formed the thought that he might use his sister as a lure. In his words, ‘if Maurice really liked my sister, it was inevitable that I would become closely associated with his X-ray work on DNA’.
But where would that work go next? In the middle of 1951 Sven Furberg’s thesis was being widely read at King’s. Rosalind had a photographic copy of the pages describing Furberg’s models and the arrangement of DNA’s sugars, bases and phosphates (the cluster of chemical groups that together is called a nucleotide). Young Furberg’s model for DNA was in the shape of a helix, and demonstrated, in the words of Harry Carlisle, head of crystallography at Birkbeck, ‘that the helix could be a natural structural system for biological macro-molecules’. She was thus acquainted, as were her colleagues, that in the chemical groups inside DNA, the sugars were not parallel to the bases but at right angles to them, but that Astbury had been right in stating that the bases were stacked parallel to each other, 3.4 Ångströms apart.
Furberg, having deposited five copies of his thesis at the University of London Library, returned to Norway, full of admiration for Britain which ‘after having suffered, fought and won the terrible war, felt able to do great things also in peace, to fight and win new battles. Huge social reforms were introduced and their scientists formed ambitious goals, like finding the structures of the fundamental molecules of life.’
This was Randall’s philosophy in a nutshell. With the same brilliance with which Britain won the war, the boffins would now solve the mysteries of the living cell.
Raymond Gosling, the ‘slave boy’, found Rosalind ‘super’ to work for. She took great delight in handling her materials. The golden hands had su
rvived the Channel crossing. She began reassembling the X-ray equipment with the Ehrenberg-Spear tube against which a single fibre would be positioned for long hours of X-ray exposure. The procedure, incredibly laborious, now done in seconds by a computer, was not a job for the ham-fisted.
Next she tackled a problem that Wilkins had encountered — making the humidity inside the camera more stable. She knew very well from her French work the importance of keeping specimens moist during the procedure. Working now with a camera with very small volume made this easier. She chose a series of salt solutions through which to bubble hydrogen into the camera at controlled humidities. She first pulled the water out by placing the DNA fibre over a drying agent, then put it back at will by increasing the humidity to a range of different values. It was sometimes possible to use the same fibre several times. Thus she, with Gosling’s assistance, demonstrated the easy, reversible hydration of DNA.
Something else Rosalind appeared to have brought from France was an apparent unconcern with the radiation emanating from X-rays. Neither she nor Gosling wore protective lead aprons, even though they worked with the X-ray beam turned on. The camera could only be aligned when the beam was on. Geoffrey Brown, who was working on the separation of nucleic acids by chromatography, came into the basement X-ray room below the level of the Thames, looking for Gosling one night and found Rosalind in semi-darkness working on the X-ray camera. ‘She shouldn’t get in the beam,’ he thought, and sensed that she was so keen to get the pictures that she was reckless. Louise Heller, too, worried about Rosalind’s failure to take proper precautions to save herself from exposure. Even so, Heller, who had worked in health physics at the US atomic energy facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, dared not mention it to a woman who ‘had the sort of drive that the work was more important than anything else’.
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