Rosalind Franklin

by Brenda Maddox

  Bernal had left Cambridge before the war and accepted the chair of physics at Birkbeck in 1937; he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society the same year. At Birkbeck he introduced the use of crystallography to study plant viruses and very large molecules with molecular weights of millions, (hydrogen having a molecular weight of two; oxygen, thirty-two.) Trying to revive this work after the war, he set up the Biomolecular Research Laboratory, opened in 1948, to resume the study of virus structure abandoned at the beginning of the war. He wrung a grant of £61,100 from the Nuffield Foundation for biomolecular research. Birkbeck contributed a smaller sum. It took over the funding in 1952 and tucked the work into its physics department, where Werner Ehrenberg and Walter Spear developed the high-intensity X-ray tube that enabled Rosalind at King’s to photograph her single DNA fibres.

  Bernal wanted a separate department of crystallography but was blocked by the Master of Birkbeck, John F. Lockwood. Their uneasy relationship was to plague Bernal, and by extension, Rosalind, during her Birkbeck years. Lockwood felt that the physics department (thanks to Bernal’s fame) was ‘becoming unbalanced’.

  At fifty-two, Bernal’s passions were crystallography, women and the Soviet Union. He attracted a stream of celebrities with left-wing political views to his flat at the top of 22 Torrington Square. The most celebrated, both of whom came in 1950, were Pablo Picasso (who left a large wall drawing behind) and the singer Paul Robeson, who sang — an event commemorated in a plaque that, like the Picasso drawing, adorns the college’s drab concrete.

  Success as a Don Juan was part of the Bernal legend. Far from handsome, he had an unruly shock of hair and terrible teeth, but a roguish smile, dazzling intellect and a fascinating stream of talk accompanied by an intent gaze on his quarry. His endless conquests were bolstered by an ideological commitment to sexual freedom, tolerated by his wife, whom he married when he was twenty-one and still at Cambridge, and by the two mistresses by whom he also had children. His reputation gave rise to many Bernal jokes: (Q: Why are there so many women in crystallography? A: Because Bernal was a crystallographer.) Another arose from Bernal’s long collaboration in the 1930s with the American scientist Isidore Fankuchen. The faithful Mrs Fankuchen, so the story goes, was so amused by Bernal’s scorecard that she started a society, ‘Women Who Have Not Been to Bed with Bernal.’ She was president and Bernal’s secretary, Anita Rimel, was treasurer. One day after the Fankuchens had returned to Brooklyn, Mrs Fankuchen is said to have received a telegram saying ‘You are now President AND Treasurer of the Society.’

  The great Dorothy Hodgkin was more than a conquest: her long affair with Bernal began about 1934 after she had left Cambridge. Between 1933 and 1936 they produced twelve joint crystallographic papers.

  Bernal encouraged contacts with the Soviet Union and influenced Acta Crystallographica to print its instructions to authors in Russian as well as English, in the hope of eliciting papers from the other side of the Iron Curtain (as he did not call it). He remained well-connected, at the same time, with the British Secret Service. One of his recruits to the staff, Dr John Mason, was asked to keep an eye on Bernal by New Scotland Yard, which he did. Yet if Mason ever reported anything to MI5, Bernal knew about it the next day.

  Rosalind stayed aloof from Bernal’s politics. Nor was she drawn into his amorous activities, because, said one of her staff, ‘she never gave him the slightest encouragement’. Part of his brilliance was attracting brilliance — the reason why Francis Crick had tried to work with him after the war. Bernal was also good at mobilising research grants and at delegating. He set up a number of very good research groups at Birkbeck and left them to themselves, while he travelled the world. For Rosalind Bernal was an understanding and supportive boss. Having directed her to a tough new subject, he let her read into it and otherwise left her alone. He told the college that while Miss Franklin was already constructing special apparatus for crystallographic research on viruses, ‘It is now clear, however, that she cannot expect to start effective observations until the autumn.’ She was therefore free to continue to interpret the X-ray diagrams of DNA and their Patterson functions.

  Much of her first months was spent in meetings with Gosling. Laughing in defiance of Randall’s ban, they worked on their joint papers and discussed his thesis. Perforce she remained ‘in an intellectual sense’ (Randall’s phrase) part of King’s laboratory, for Gosling had not been given another thesis adviser. For this service Gosling rewarded her with an effusive solo acknowledgement in his introduction to the thesis. Ignoring the work he had done with Wilkins and Stokes, Gosling wrote: ‘I am deeply indebted to Dr R.E. Franklin, who has introduced me to the techniques of X-ray crystallography and with whom I have worked most closely throughout this investigation.’

  Rosalind laughed off Randall’s letter telling her to stop thinking about the nucleic acids as ‘Just the sort of thing they do there.’ She could hardly stop thinking about the nucleic acids. Ribonucleic acid (RNA) was an important ingredient of the tobacco mosaic virus to which Bernal was directing her.

  RNA was the acid next door, a second form of the nucleic acid found in every cell. It is like DNA except for having one more oxygen atom attached to each of its sugars. Jim Watson said of his own useful research in 1952, when Sir Lawrence Bragg had ordered him off DNA, ‘I had decided to mark time by working on tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). A vital component of TMV was nucleic acid, and so it was the perfect front to mask my continued interest in DNA.’

  Rosalind needed no front. All the work she and Gosling had done with the fiddly Beevers—Lipson strips had not been wasted. In addition to the two major manuscripts sent to Acta Cryst, which had been accepted for September but needed adjustments, they composed a second note for Nature that spring, giving their evidence for ‘a two-strand helical molecule of the Structure A form of DNA’ and saying that it was ‘based mainly on a study of the cylindrically symmetrical Patterson function of Structure A’. The note appeared on 25 July, and confirmed the Watson-Crick proposal in principal but not on ‘points of detail’.

  Rosalind was always eager for invitations to speak, especially abroad. She liked always to have two speaking engagements in her diary, to reassure herself - she told a friend - against the day ‘when it is all over’. That day seemed hardly imminent. In April she went to Aachen to read a paper on ‘The Mechanism of Crystallite Growth in Carbons’ (later published in German) and in June to Paris, to read a short paper on ‘Le role de l’eau dans l’acide graphitique’. This paper was full of plural references to work done with her old mentor, Jacques Mering: ‘Nous avons étudié les diagrammes de rayons X’, ‘nous déduisons’ and ‘A partir de nos résultats’ but, as before, only her name appeared on it when it was published. While in Paris, she was invited to do some work: ‘So I’ve been back to the old lab, with the same people and same apparatus — all very pleasant.’ Among the French treats she brought back to London from her satisfying journey was a curved piece of quartz crystal to make a focused X-ray beam.

  (Her hospitable bent moved her to loan her flat whenever possible. During her frequent travels, she kept 22 Donovan Court full of friends passing through London and, on one occasion, when a London friend found herself temporarily without accommodation after having a baby, Rosalind moved out and installed mother, grandmother and infant in the flat, which she had stocked with a cot and nappies.)

  In the spring of 1953 Rosalind could not have dreamed what Watson, Crick and Wilkins would be saying from platforms in the twenty-first century — that her contribution was critical to the discovery of the double helix of DNA. With no idea that her data had been used, she had no sense of having been overtaken in a race which the Cavendish had won. Rather, Watson and Crick were now her collaborators, on the way to becoming her friends. In any event, she did not accept their DNA structure as more than a hypothesis. She referred to it as ‘the Watson-Crick model’ and in the second of her Acta Cryst papers, both of which appeared in September, she wrote that ‘discrepanc
ies prevent us from accepting it in detail’.

  While her Acta papers were in the press in the spring and summer of 1953, she sent copies to Watson for his comments and received a reply from Crick, saying that as Jim had left for the States, he would answer instead. Addressing her as ‘Miss Franklin’ (the correct form for writing to a female colleague; a man would have been addressed as ‘Franklin’), Crick asked — as if their own historic letter to Nature had not settled the matter — whether the phosphates in DNA really must be accessible (i.e., on the outside); whether calf thymus was the only source to yield Structure A and what fibres gave only Structure B? About her second paper, he wondered whether the unit cell was ‘truly face-centred monoclinic, and not really triclinic, with two angles 90167/’. The point was important, he said, ‘because if the unit cell is strictly C2, one must have the DNA chains in pairs, running in opposite directions’.

  Rosalind’s paper does indeed say ‘C2 is the only space group possible’. This shows that, even though she had missed its antiparallel implications, she understood very well what the space group C2 was. It is a puzzle why Watson and Crick, considering the information so crucial to their discovery, had not mentioned the fact in their two Nature papers of 1953. Nor did they mention the space group by name in the much longer, more detailed paper on the DNA structure that appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society the following year. This omission, viewed half a century later, remains inexplicable.

  Crick was not being ingenuous in his letter to Rosalind. The questions he posed were still open. The letter to Nature of 25 April 1953, a turning point in scientific history, had not struck scientists of the time like a thunderclap from heaven. Their awakening to its importance was very gradual. Many did not believe it for years, Erwin Chargaff remaining a conspicuous and sarcastic hold-out. Other scientists recall their initial scepticism.

  At the Institut Pasteur in Paris, François Jacob recalled, the Watson-Crick article ‘had not electrified me or anyone else in the laboratory. The crystallographic argument went over my head.’

  When Gunther Stent, at the Virus Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, heard the news from Max Delbrück in March 1953, he ran to tell his colleagues that there had been a fabulous breakthrough. They weren’t interested. ‘Look at Pauling!’ was their reaction. ‘It’ll be just a few weeks until some biochemist is going to show that the Watson-Crick structure is baloney as well.’ But Pauling was not quick to admit his ideas were ‘baloney’ and continued, even after he read the Watson-Crick paper, to believe that his own three-chain structure had merit.

  Crick himself much later recalled that he had certainly believed their structure was:

  along the right lines (though Jim had occasional doubts), but the experimental evidence, though supporting the model, was at that time not enough to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. Strictly speaking, our model was not finally decisively proved till some 25 or so years later, when the crystal structure of short lengths of DNA of defined sequences was solved by the isomorphous replacement method.

  What remained to be discovered was how the double helix came apart. The two chains could not copy themselves without unwinding, but no one knew how it was done. In July 1953 the Royal Society’s summer conversazione included among its exhibits a model and presentation entitled ‘A proposed structure for DNA’, which identified seven scientists as contributors: Watson, Crick, Wilkins, Franklin, Wilson, Stokes and Gosling. Gosling was guarding the model when along came the eminent J.B.S. Haldane, ‘puffing on this foul Woodbine, and he looked at it for a long time, and then he said: ‘‘So what you want is an un-twiddle-ase’’.’ (In biochemistry, ‘—ase’ is the suffix meaning an enzyme.)

  The importance of the discovery, however, was recognised at Cold Spring Harbor where Watson turned up at a symposium in June 1953. The triumph was celebrated in the inevitable show, in a ditty for two voices, one announcing ‘I’m Watson’, the other, ‘I’m Krick’:

  Let us show you our trick —

  We have found where the seed of life sprang from.

  We believe we’re a stew

  Of molecular goo

  With a period of 34 Angstrom.

  Another verse hit at the well-known girl-watching proclivities of the intrepid pair:

  So just think what this means

  To our respective genes —

  That sex need not be disgusting;

  All you girls try the trick

  Of Watson and Krick

  And achieve double helical lusting.

  A Radcliffe student, waiting on tables at the symposium, fed up with the flirtatious banter, said she had named her two cats Watson and Crick. ‘And,’ she added darkly, ‘they’re neutered.’

  So slow was the double helix news to travel that when in the summer of 1953 Bernal introduced Rosalind to Sven Furberg, whose pioneering work at Birkbeck in 1949 was cited in the Watson-Crick paper, Furberg was surprised to find a copy of his thesis on Rosalind’s desk. She asked him whether he believed the Watson-Crick proposal that the DNA molecule was a helix. Believe it? He had not even read it. (Bernal later reproached himself for the road not taken and thought if Birkbeck had pursued Furberg’s work, there might have been an ‘almost simultaneous discovery’.)

  Waiting for the apparatus in order to get down to serious work on the tobacco virus, Rosalind had time for a prolonged holiday. Like her Aunt Mamie Bentwich, Rosalind had always been sceptical about the Zionist dream of a national homeland for the Jews. Now that the dream had been realised and Israel was a five-year-old independent state, she decided to go and take a look.

  Boarding the ‘Tauern Express’ at Victoria Station, with Anne Piper as company as far as Greece, she headed first for Ljubljana where she was received once more with great warmth. A scientific colleague said to Anne about Rosalind, ‘She makes my clock tick.’ Anne returned to England from Greece and Rosalind got a boat to Haifa from Piraeus.

  At Haifa she was met by relatives and friends, who included her cousin Irene Neuner, her wartime housemate in Putney. They organised for Rosalind to be taken by taxi to Jerusalem where she toured ten synagogues and witnessed tight orthodox communities. Her ambivalence about Jews was stirred. She wrote her parents, who, she knew, would understand:

  I find it hard to see what can be the common factor in anti-semitism which is directed both against the ghetto Jews and the successful assimilated or near-assimilated Jews — so different that I find it hard to remember that what I saw last night was the way the majority of Jews lived in Poland and other East European countries right up to the last war.

  I find it repulsive that the young should be made equally grotesque, and deliberately isolated from anything resembling a broader life and forbidden any of the normal subjects in school . . . I’m told that these young — who finally get away — frequently are fantastically anti-religious or communist.

  She had no such doubts about the Weizmann Institute of Science at Rehovoth. Her second cousin David Samuel, grandson of Herbert Samuel, was working there: another scientist in the family. She found the research excellent and the climate wonderful. She might, she told her mother, ‘be tempted to seek work there: but the community was too small and isolated — all 28 and 35 and having babies at the same time . . .’

  As she went about the country, however, the sight of kibbutz life disturbed her deeply. Identifying, as so often, with the children, she wrote home:

  I can sympathise with the desire of somebody whose intellectual background is fully developed to go off to the country and let their intellect thrive on more rudimentary things (though I should never want to do it myself) but for children who have never been elsewhere or even seen town life — it can’t mean the same thing.

  Determined to see as much of the country as she could, she hitchhiked to remote spots — something her cousin Irene felt was a very risky thing for a young woman to do. At some point a lorry driver who gave her a lift tried to rape her. Her cousin later commented ‘I thi
nk it shook even her’; but Rosalind was undeterred.

  She went to the southernmost tip of Israel, to Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba; the town then barely existed — it was just a handful of huts and a wind pump. She also made her way to Sodom on the Dead Sea. More difficulties appeared.

  The only ‘restaurant’ was a large cave by the Dead Sea [run by a] man who sold bottled drinks ... I was escorted to the cave by some French-speaking Moroccans and ate sardines and drank orange juice. There seemed to be no option but to spend the night in the cave, but a party of tourists arrived and took me back to Bersheba — 6 men from 4 different countries.

  Only towards the end of her stay did Rosalind visit Tel Aviv. Perhaps it was just as well. Her disapproval of Jews who fulfilled the stereotype flooded over her, as she explained to her parents:

  I had been more than adequately warned about the people, who disgusted me far more than the architecture. I’m afraid German Jews in Tel Aviv make just the same impression on one as Germans in Germany, typified by the hotel keeper: ‘Mein Gott, warum you don’t speak Deutsch.’ They all cheat you as badly as orientals — and one minds it more ... In fact, Tel Aviv would make anyone anti-semitic.