On 12 March Wilkins made the journey to Cambridge to see for himself what he had learned on the telephone from Kendrew, Watson and Crick apparently being too embarrassed to tell him directly that they had cracked DNA. There stood the model, its elegance proclaiming its accuracy. Wilkins (unfortunately for Rosalind, King’s being over-modest yet again) spurned any idea of joint authorship: ‘I felt the model as such was their work. Crick agreed with alacrity.’ Separate publication was decided upon. Wilkins then returned to London and, in his words, ‘I told everybody.’
For Rosalind, the news that the Cavendish had cracked DNA was an irrelevant parting gift. She had confidence in her own two papers, on their way to publication, that would give solid data on DNA’s structure, not a mere hypothesis. In any event, she and Gosling had their shorter paper on the B form nearly ready and she would turn her hand to polishing it up the following week.
Rosalind came to say goodbye to Freda Ticehurst and to thank the photographer for all she had done for her. She said (in Freda’s recollection), ‘I’m not wanted here — we [meaning Wilkins] could never work together. It’s impossible for me to stay.’ Her valediction delivered, she packed up, and turned her back on King’s College London. One thought that certainly never crossed her mind was that half a century later the institution she despised would name a building after her, coupling it with the name of the adversary who had branded her forever as the ‘dark lady’.
THIRTEEN
Escaping Notice
ROSALIND'S PART in the great discovery was obscured by a series of manoeuvres made behind her back. For Watson and Crick, once they had solved the structure, the next step was to publish quickly. Speed was essential for staking a claim. A short letter to Nature was the obvious medium. But they were in a tight spot. They knew they were right to declare their inspired insights. But how to give credit to the King’s experiments that had been the springboard to their imagination? They could hardly refer to Rosalind’s data which had not yet been published. An explicit acknowledgement would publicly reveal the Cavendish’s intrusion into King’s territory, the violation of the gentleman’s agreement, as Watson put it, ‘of not working on the problem of a close friend’. A third snag was the Medical Research Council report. Officially unpublished, the report could not easily be cited as a reference without Perutz being identified as the transmitter. In any event, before the Cavendish duo could do anything, the heads of the laboratories concerned, Bragg of the Cavendish and Randall of King’s, would have to come to an accommodation on acknowledgements.
When (according to his recollection, it was 12 March 1953) Maurice Wilkins went up to Cambridge to see the model, Watson detected ‘not a hint of bitterness in Maurice’s voice’, rather a recognition that the structure would be of great benefit to biology’. The following day Wilkins tried to telephone Crick and could not reach him. History can be grateful, for Wilkins penned another of his vivid letters, combining disarming modesty with stoic acceptance of fate:
Dear Francis,
I think you’re a couple of old rogues but you may well have something. I like the idea. Thanks for the MSS. I was a bit peeved because I was convinced the 1:1 ratio was significant & had a 4 planar group sketched and was going to look into it & as I was back again on helical schemes I might, given a little time, have got it. But there is no good grousing — I think it’s a very exciting notion & who the hell got it isn’t what matters.
Whatever his true feelings, Wilkins knew his moral advantage. Who the hell got it did matter. So did the glaring fact that the experimental work had been done entirely at King’s. He pressed Francis gracefully, apologising for ‘being a trifle awkward on 2 points’. First, he thought Bruce Fraser should have an opportunity to publish the ideas he had proposed in late 1951 and had built into a reasonable (if three-chain) model:
we rather stopped him doing so a year ago because we thought we could do better and didn’t. I have sent him a cable. I don’t think Fraser’s thing anything like as nice as yours but it’s a hell of a sight better than Pauling’s.
Wilkins, wanting credit for the considerable work he himself had done on DNA, then added that he would like to publish a brief accompanying note in Nature at the same time, with a picture showing the general helical case. He made no mention of Rosalind’s work.
As he was finishing his letter to Crick, Wilkins was interrupted by Gosling saying that he and Rosalind had a paper all written. As indeed they did; Rosalind had told Pauling about it a couple of weeks earlier. ‘Just heard of a new entrant in the helical rat race,’ Wilkins added to Crick, uncharitably interpreting the news as Rosalind ‘jumping on the bandwagon’: ‘So at least 3 short articles in Nature. Christ!’ Wilkins signed off with another metaphoric flourish: ‘As one rat to another, good racing. M.’
The mood at King’s was in reality not quite so light-hearted. Randall was, in the words of Willy Seeds, ‘like a scalded rat’ when he heard that the Cavendish had beaten King’s. Geoffrey and Angela Brown felt that the news was a very big blow to Wilkins and that he was devastated. Gosling felt ‘quite upset, quite scooped’. Anthony and Margaret North remembered that ‘everyone had forty fits at King’s when Cambridge got there first. Randall was furious, his nose out of joint. After all, he had created the biggest biophysics laboratory in Britain and had little to show for it.’
‘Had it been the other way around,’ the irascible Jerry Donohue said later, ‘if someone anywhere had done the same with the data collected by the MRC group at the Cavendish, the resulting eruption would have paled that of Krakatoa to a grain of corn popping.’
Randall was in no position to erupt. Instead, he made sure that his lab would have two of its own papers in Nature along with Watson’s and Crick’s and that theirs would be held up until those from King’s were ready. ‘Get writing!’ his order went out. L.J.F. Brimble, moreover, one of the two editors of Nature, was, like Randall, a member of the Athenaeum, and, as the first of many to feel sorry for King’s having been pipped at the post, gave Randall the opportunity to have King’s work represented in what was going to be a momentous occasion.
In the ensuing panic to get King’s papers ready, Wilkins cabled — a dramatic gesture in those austere times — Bruce Fraser in Australia and asked him to write up his model as quickly as possible in a note suitable for publication in Nature. Fraser complied. In view of the urgency, he sat up all night typing the very paper Wilkins had suppressed two years earlier and sketching the diagrams. There were no photocopying machines in 1953, and had Fraser not done it by hand, the manuscript would have lain several days in a queue before being photographed for duplication. Then, even more expensively, Fraser had his work cabled off to London next morning.
But when the Fraser paper arrived, Crick vetoed it: what was the point of publishing wrong data? Instead, he and Watson appended an acknowledgement to Fraser at the end of their own paper, describing the Fraser model as ‘rather ill-defined’ and the Fraser paper as ‘in the press’. It was not, and was never published.
In their own historic letter to Nature, Watson and Crick referred to ‘the following communications’, meaning the two papers from King’s — ‘Molecular Structure of Deoxypentose Nucleic Acids’ by Wilkins, Alec Stokes and Herbert Wilson; the other, ‘Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate’ by Franklin and Gosling — with the comment: ‘We were not aware of the details of the results presented there when we devised our structure . . .’
That was the truth, narrowly speaking. Even though they had not seen the King’s papers when they sent their own first draft to Wilkins, Watson and Crick did know many of the details of the King’s work. They knew these from Maurice’s conversation, from Rosalind’s photograph and from the MRC report — enough to admit, in guarded language, that all the experimental work had been done at King’s, and in a paper written a year later to say, in a footnote, that ‘without this data [from the King’s College Group] the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not imposs
ible.’ In the excitement of discovery it seems to have escaped their notice that while Rosalind’s work was fundamental to the discovery, she had not been consulted on its use. But once they had seen the beauty and simplicity of the model, the importance of her data receded. They hadn’t needed it; once they had grasped the base pairs, the copying mechanism was clear.
Had L.J.F (‘Jack’) Brimble and Arthur Gale, joint editors of Nature since 1939, known of the true genesis of the Watson-Crick discovery, they might have insisted that Rosalind’s name be included among the principal authors of the primary paper. Or they might have positioned her and Gosling’s paper, with its vital photograph, second, rather than third, in the sequence of three papers. Sadly, the editors’ part in the orchestration of the whole tripartite publication in Nature will never be known. The voluminous and unsorted Nature archive was thrown out during a move to new offices in 1963; thus there was nothing available when Macmillan, the publishing company which owns Nature, sold its own archive to the British Library in 1966.
Did Rosalind suspect the part her work had played in the design of the double helix model? In retrospect Gosling, Perutz and Crick believe that she must have done. It was obvious once she looked at it that the dimensions of the molecule fitted her data on the diameter and the repeat number of nucleotides in a turn. Yet she did not complain. Insofar as is known, she did not protest to anyone, not even to Gosling, who went up with her to Cambridge to see the model. Her attitude, as he recalled, was ‘It’s very pretty, but how are they going to prove it?’
In the event, there was a certain amount of pre-publication negotiation between London and Cambridge about the actual wording of the three papers. During the editing, Wilkins himself played a part in toning down Watson’s and Crick’s delicately crafted admission of the information they had obtained from King’s. Wilkins asked Crick to cut out the word ‘beautiful’ from his text (possibly a compliment paid to Rosalind’s and Gosling’s beautiful X-ray photographs). ‘Delete very beautiful,’ he suggested, ‘and say ‘‘We have been stimulated by the work of the group at King’s or something.’’’ He also asked: ‘Could you delete the sentence ‘‘It is known that there is much unpublished experimental material.’’ (This reads a bit ironical.)’
Nothing is more ironical than the words Rosalind wrote, inserted by hand into her typescript in order to adapt it to accompany the Watson-Crick paper. The alteration transformed her own fundamental findings into a ‘me-too’ effort. The inserted words were: ‘Thus our general ideas are consistent with the model proposed by Crick and Watson.’ So indeed they should have been consistent, considering that the Watson-Crick model was in large part derived from her work. The striking Photo 51 of the B form of DNA appeared as an illustration to her and Gosling’s own paper, with no suggestion that Watson had seen it, let alone been inspired by it. She appended also her comment that the photograph ‘is strongly characteristic ... of a helical structure’.
Watson and Crick’s short classic letter glides to its end with the penultimate, now-celebrated, line: ‘It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.’
It had not escaped Watson’s and Crick’s notice either that Rosalind’s work was fundamental to their discovery and that they had not consulted her about its use. While Rosalind seems to have suspected that her data had somehow reached Cambridge, no one at King’s nor at the Cavendish bothered — or, considering her temper, dared — to press the matter further. To all concerned, she was an awkward member of King’s staff on the way out.
Randall himself may never have realised exactly what had happened although he must have been half-aware of Wilkins’s role as transmitter. In any event, he was unconcerned with justice for Rosalind. He certainly gave Rosalind no thanks for her contribution to the great discovery. There was a party at King’s when the three papers came out in Nature on 25 April 1953, under the umbrella heading, ‘Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids.’ During the celebrations, the photographer Freda Ticehurst looked around and asked pointedly, ‘Where’s Rosalind?’ In reply, she got ‘some looks’.
Far from thanking her, Randall sent a letter to Rosalind at Birkbeck a week before the trio of papers on the structure of DNA were to appear in Nature. Addressing her formally as ‘Miss Franklin’, he told her not only to stop working on DNA, but to stop thinking about it:
You will no doubt remember that when we discussed the question of your leaving my laboratory you agreed that it would be better for you to cease to work on the nucleic acid problem and take up something else. I appreciate that it is difficult to stop thinking immediately about a subject on which you have been so deeply engaged, but I should be grateful if you could now clear up, or write up, the work to the appropriate stage. A very real point about which I am a little troubled is that it is obviously not right that Gosling should be supervised by someone not specifically resident in this laboratory. You will realise that the necessary reorganisation for this purpose which arises from your departure cannot really proceed while you remain, in an intellectual sense, a member of the laboratory.
Yours sincerely
J.T. Randall
It can be argued that scientific discovery is not creativity in the sense that artistic composition is. ‘Science differs from other realms of human endeavour,’ according to Dr Walter Gratzer, ‘in that its substance does not derive from the activity of those who practise it.’
If Beethoven had not written his Ninth Symphony, no one else would have done it. In contrast, if Watson and Crick had not discovered the double helix of DNA, others would have found it, and probably not long after. Rosalind came close to getting the answer herself. That her draft manuscript dated 17 March 1953, proving how close she was, should only have come to light many years later is one of the many ways in which fortune did her no favours.
Part Three
FOURTEEN
The Acid Next Door
(March-December 1953)
IN MOVING TO Birkbeck College in Bloomsbury, Rosalind was, as she said, moving ‘from a palace to a slum’, but it was a slum teeming with interest. The world-renowned crystallographer J.D. Bernal, the head of the physics department, appreciated that she was a brilliant experimentalist. He was eager, as he told his administrative superiors, ‘to get her assistance in a new attack on problems of virus structure, for which we have particular experience and facilities here’.
There were no ‘hooded crows’ at left-wing non-sectarian Birkbeck. The college was founded in 1823 as the ‘London Mechanics’ Institution’ in much the same spirit as Ellis Franklin’s ‘Working Men’s College’: to offer evening education to craftsmen and small employers ‘in the principles of the arts they practised and in the various branches of science and useful knowledge’. It became Birkbeck in 1907 and a full college of the University of London in 1920. Located in Bream’s Buildings near Chancery Lane, the college held all its classes at night; a condition of admittance was that the student be engaged in full-time day employment.
The college barely survived the rupture of the war. In 1951 a dreary new modern block on Malet Street replaced a building lost during the war, adding to the University of London’s architectural desecration of Georgian Bloomsbury. For the rest, Birkbeck operated in scrappy makeshift accommodation, with its science done under appalling conditions. Crystallography teaching and research were done nearby at 21,22 and 32 Torrington Square, in bomb-damaged red-brick eighteenth-century houses more suitable for film sets than laboratories. Within the Upstairs, Downstairs interior, scientists worked on structures of viruses and searched for life forms in meteorites. Outside, a descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Old Lamplighter’ came on a bicycle at dusk with a burning rag on the end of a long pole to ignite the gas lamps, returning in the morning to put them out.
Rosalind’s office was on the fifth floor in what used to be a maid’s room, reached by a narrow staircase leading up from the main fl
oors below. The X-ray equipment was in the basement, the former kitchen, where the ceiling leaked. She had to hold an umbrella over her head while setting up her equipment.
John Desmond Bernal was so much a legend in his lifetime that he lived comfortably with the nickname he had acquired as a Cambridge undergraduate, ‘Sage’. He knew, and everybody knew he knew, everything. He was equally at ease in French and Finnegans Wake. His omniscience inspired many stories. It is said that when the New Statesman, preparing a profile, asked Bernal to name a subject with which he was unfamiliar, he suggested ‘eighth-century Roumanian churches’. A few days later he asked if he might amend that to ‘sixth-century Roumanian churches’. In C.P. Snow’s Cambridge novel The Search, Constantine, a scientist modelled on Bernal, is shown walking home from a meeting of the Chemical Society, discoursing on the Cretan Renaissance and Chinese economics in the Tang dynasty.
Bernal’s background was as eclectic as his interests. Born in Ireland to a Sephardic Jewish father of Catholic faith and an American Presbyterian mother who converted to Catholicism and who spoke French to him as a boy, Bernal was educated by the Jesuits. Moving on to Cambridge he became a scientist and a Marxist. His field was crystallography and he taught, among others, Max Perutz, Maurice Wilkins and Dorothy Hodgkin. During the Second World War he was scientific adviser to Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations. Mountbatten much admired him, Communist affiliation notwithstanding, and took him to the Quebec Conference in August 1943 to help plan the D-Day landings. Bernal was helped in choosing the landing beaches by the Anglo-Norman poem, ‘Roman de Rou’ about the escape of Duke William (not yet the Conqueror). This provided old Norman place names which, when studied, revealed a silted-up harbour. For his patriotic service to the Allies, in 1947 Bernal was awarded the US Medal of Freedom. Further American honours and indeed an American visa were denied him after 1949 when he became vice-president of the World Peace Committee, making frequent trips to Eastern Europe. In 1951 he founded Scientists for Peace, the forerunner of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In 1953, just as Rosalind joined his lab, Bernal eulogised Stalin in an obituary, called him ‘a great scientist’ as well as ‘the greatest figure of contemporary history’.
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