At Woods Hole she was given a room, or rather a bed, at a family of summer residents who had rooms to let. The Littles, known locally as the ‘little Littles’, had eight children under twelve. Soon after Rosalind arrived, the older children announced that there was going to be a hurricane. They were right. Rosalind observed the developing drama with scientific detachment:
It certainly was an interesting day. The wind had been strong all night. Look at the map to see that Cape Cod is a long and very narrow peninsula jutting straight out into the Atlantic south of Boston. Woods Hole is the near end of the peninsula, but with sea very nearly all round. When I first went out, about 9 a.m., the wind was lifting large amounts of sea and blowing it across the village, and the water level, 3 hours before high tide, was already well above the normal high tide level. The wind was very strong but I’ve known English gales reach similar strength. I think that the speciality of the hurricane wind is its persistence in the high strength and constant direction so that the sea piles up far above its normal level. Soon we saw from the laboratory windows that piers and landing stages were breaking up.
Then the water came up over the sea wall — just rising steadily, with a rough sea but not really giant waves. Cars parked in the lower parts of the town began to get wet and there was a rush to find high parking places. I came back to see how things were in my digs and found water half way up the walls in the sitting room and the older children proudly told me that they’d been giving their younger brother a swimming lesson in the sitting room. We got back to the labs — the most substantial building here — just before they became isolated from the rest of the town by water 5 or 6 feet deep. There was an endless succession of strange sights. Boats broken loose were trying to get in at closed windows. Large landing stages, boats and dustbins drifted around the streets — one of the biggest rafts came to rest against a submerged car about % mile from the sea. In fact it was all exactly like the picture that one sees of heavy floods but doesn’t really expect to become involved in. The rise of water was fastest between about 12 and 1, then, quite suddenly, the water receded — without any comparably sudden change in wind speed. This left a new succession of weird sights — unexpected objects perched in unexpected places. A large part of the afternoon was spent trying to move a yacht from the main road. The mast had broken and the top half, attached by steel hawsers was tied in complicated knots around the telephone wires. While a large group worked with knives, poles, hooks, etc., a uniformed coastguard stood by repeating, ‘This is a highway, the road must now be cleared at once!!’ Much of the rest of the day [was] spent in sweeping water out of houses, making fires to dry houses, and spreading out wet objects. (My own things stayed dry on the Ist floor). There were no casualties in this area.
At Woods Hole she was also greeted by Jim Watson, arrived from Caltech. Celebrity had begun its descent on Watson. In the August issue of Vogue, his face appeared on the same page as Richard Burton’s, described — Watson’s, not Burton’s — as having the bemused look of an English poet’. For Jim the glamour made up (nearly) for Crick having been invited to explain the double helix in a forthcoming edition of Scientific American.
To Watson’s relief, Rosalind was very pleasant and eager to talk to him about TMV. He realised that her recent X-ray diffraction pictures confirmed and extended his 1952 proposal that the protein subunits of TMW were arranged in a helix. He also had to agree with his friend Leslie Orgel (or so he wrote half a century later) ‘that she had been judged most unfairly when working on DNA’.
With apparently no fear that she might strike him in her hot anger, Watson offered her a lift to California as he and Sydney Brenner, a South African microbiological research student en route to Caltech from Oxford, were about to make the transcontinental drive. But she had to decline. She had tight travel plans with many stops, mainly in the industrial belt of the mid-West, for her lectures on coal, before she could think of the West Coast.
When the time came to move on, Rosalind was sorry to leave Boston:
which I was beginning to think of as my home town on this continent. Boston prides itself on being a cultural centre and really to some extent is so. The public library is beautifully laid out around a large pseudo-Italian courtyard and fountains, with seats around where people sit and read and keep cool on hot evenings. There is even one-half of the courtyard reserved for non-smokers.
From Woods Hole she went on to New York, which she found uncivilised and rude, with important exceptions: the museums and the skyline, seen from the Brooklyn hilltop flat of the David Harkers of the Brooklyn Polytechnic with whom she was staying. (Harker was a protein crystallographer.) The three of them, Rosalind said, spent most of the time on the terrace roof with a view across to Lower Manhattan: ‘The sky-scraper group is surprisingly beautiful, and changes with changing light like mountain scenery. I have to keep telling myself that it’s real.’
In Philadelphia she saw Anne and David Sayre, resuming an old friendship and seeing another great art museum. She still nurtured her disapproval of American plenty, but it was beginning to melt. She wrote Colin and Charlotte:
I’m also astonished by the amount of everything to spare — especially good land unused, even just around Boston, because there’s better land elsewhere or more money in New York. The greater part of New England is just wasted. It makes nonsense of all the world-planning talk about cultivating the desert and the jungle — all they have to do is to cultivate America and distribute the products, and world food production problems would be solved.
So far I’ve met 2 very different groups. The most industrial and research people at New Hampton, quite pleasant but not very interesting, working in large numbers with vast amounts of money and getting no further than Europeans with much more limited means. But in the other field, fundamental biology, America is really leading and they have a remarkable number of first class people among the under 30s. In spite of the vast distances, they all know each other rather well, and constantly exchange visits.
With some pity, she said that someone had told her that England had a hot day and she hoped it had come while Colin and Charlotte were at the seaside. ‘Here, apart from hurricanes, the weather is wonderful.’
In a letter to her mother she was again full of praise for American scientists. She said she had met ‘a surprising number of really first class people who form an elite group superior to any I have come across in England’.
Her conversion had begun.
Rosalind crossed America, sought after, singing for her supper. She gave her coal lecture at least six times. For the first part of her trip she was usually surrounded by ‘the carbon crowd’ of respectful industrialists:
My lab visits were in 2 curiously interesting groups. In the carbon world the work I did in Paris seems to form the background to a large part of the industrial research going on here, and I’m welcomed as an ‘authority’ on the subject. So much so, that I had a nightmare in which I was surrounded by solemn middle-aged Americans all saying ‘and what we should like to ask your opinion about next Miss Franklin is . . .’ and then I woke up. In the biological laboratories, on the other hand, I have much to learn and almost nothing to give, and it is a question of hunting out the people who enjoy wasting their time talking to me.
The contrast between the two groups of people I meet is also very striking. The carbon crowd are entirely uninspired, but in the biological laboratories there are an impressive number of really first-class people.
‘First-class’ again: the Oxbridge seal of approval. After less than two weeks in America, she wrote to Bernal that already she had heard of three serious X-ray diffraction studies on TMV and wondered if she could quickly write some papers when she got back, even before he returned from China.
As she worked her way across the continent, seeing many eminent scientists — Erwin Chargaff, George Gamow, Vladimir Vand, Isidore Fankuchen — some of whom she had met in Europe, she formed her impressions of their surroundings.
‘Pittsburgh is as black as Manchester or Newcastle . . . though the inhabitants all insist that it got black before the new smoke-control laws were introduced. However, the blast furnaces just outside the town pour out a frightful orange-red smoke, presumably nitric oxide, such as I’ve never seen anywhere.’ She was not impressed by Pennsylvania State in western Pennsylvania. It was ‘a university of 11,000 students in a town of population 12,000 built in ‘‘campus’’ style, well-built and laid out, but devastatingly dull. I can’t think how even the natives can tolerate living there.’
Rosalind’s ‘Letters from America’ are a fine contribution to the tradition stretching from de Tocqueville and Fanny Trollope to Alistair Cooke. Dazzled by the sweep of the United States, with new impressions crowding in faster than she could write them down, she composed her letters home with the enthusiasm of a Victorian traveller and the precision of an experimentalist. (She expected them to be circulated, even to Nannie, then kept for her return — as they were.) In Chicago she described being shown round the city by the Ellises, the former Eisenstadters whom the Franklins had helped escape from Austria in 1939. They took her to the art museum and to the theatre: ‘a comedy — heavy-handed in the American manner’. Travelling to Cleveland she got a good look at Lake Erie, which:
seen from the laboratory windows, was bright blue. But the water is badly polluted by industry, and repulsive to look at close up. I was driven to and from the airport by a scientist who, in the usual American way, told me all the details of the mortgage on his suburban house, and the money he’d borrowed to buy a car.
American homes and gardens fascinated her. She was taken to a faculty home in Madison, Wisconsin, where:
The front door opened in to an enormous living room, the only one in the house, as in medieval England (no door). In one corner is a huge fireplace, encased in stone in which was a fine blazing wood fire (the evening was chilly). The principal difference between the Americans and their ancestors is that the former use open fires for decoration only.
Halfway across America her prejudices had moderated. She had discovered Americans to be hospitable, practical, charitable and art-loving, even if their cultural appreciation left something to be desired:
In their museums . . . they’ve got whole pillaged European churches and cloisters, and if anybody had told me about it before I should have been furious. But these things are beautifully laid out, and with the brilliant sunshine one gets here one can really for a moment get something out of the atmosphere of medieval Italy. Not only do I feel that this must give the poor Americans some compensation for living so far from Europe, but I would almost think it is worth sending some more cloisters as a civilising influence.
From Chicago she went to St Louis, to the botanical laboratory of Dr Barry Commoner at Washington University of St Louis. Commoner was working on an abnormal protein he called B8; it was not a virus component but resembled the protein in TMV. For Rosalind, this was the most interesting visit so far and they began what would be a fruitful collaboration which would result in a joint paper to Nature the following June.
As she proceeded westwards, she was increasingly dazzled (as who is not?) by the grandeur of the desert, the mountains, the clear air, the red vegetation and exotic birds. Rosalind neglected nothing. She journeyed to the bottom of the Grand Canyon by mule train and deplored the use of ‘the Indians as tourist attractions . . . which I find rather horrible’. She did not mind the other residents dressed as if in a cowboy movie and joked about an isolated ranch where ‘I looked in vain for a hero to gallop in on a white horse’. She liked American trains too; its third class was more comfortable than European first class. Never shy of a generalisation, she classified Americans for her parents. They were at best:
kind and well-meaning but incredibly ignorant and selfsatisfied. On the other hand, the university scientists are as fine a crowd as I’ve met anywhere. They throw themselves into their work with a whole-heartedness that is rarely found in England and get real pleasure out of it . . . And they seem very good at working together happily and unselfishly in groups in a way that is rare in England.
Today I complete the transcontinental journey — the weather is heavenly, with a wonderfully clean atmosphere.
In California, she first visited the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and was pleased to see that ‘The oldest influence in Southern California — going back some 150 years — is Spanish, and this has a pleasing effect on architecture in the better parts, such as the stuccoed arches and red tile roofs.’ She had some good scientific conversations with virus and botany researchers, including Sam Wildman, professor of botany, and Albert Siegel, a geneticist, then moved on to Linus Pauling’s institution, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), at Pasadena ‘about 25 miles away (but still in Los Angeles)’. She gave two talks, the first of which Pauling attended, on X-raying crystals of tobacco mosaic virus.
At Caltech she met Jim Watson again. There was much to talk about, such as the news from a young crystallographer at Yale, Don Caspar, that the TMV virus had a hollow centre, filled with water. If so, where was the RNA, the nucleic acid that had been assumed to be there? Watson drove her up to dinner at Pauling’s beautiful home in the hills above Pasadena. A less successful outing with Watson and Sydney Brenner took her into the honky-tonk sections of Los Angeles and Hollywood. They could see that she was deeply shocked by the girlie photos on display. She wrote as much to her parents:
The centre of Hollywood is vulgar and characterless, and only a little less sordid than the centre of Los Angeles. Here I was shown the worst part, which is really incredibly awful. Bad patches can be found in any big city, but none of the same extent as this, even if of the same depravity.
The University of California at Berkeley, outside San Francisco, in contrast, was disappointing. Scientifically, the five-day visit was rewarding and essential for her TMV research but strangely formal, and the famed Virus Laboratory, at the top of the campus, with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, ‘the first unfriendly lab I’ve come to’. Instead of being invited into private homes and shown the cultural sights as she had been everywhere else, apart from one drive around the Bay, she was taken back to her hotel almost every afternoon at 5.30 and left to fend for herself until the next day. In spite of the ‘perfect climate’ and a quick impression that San Francisco was almost as civilised as Boston, she was glad to fly on to Washington, where she stayed in Bethesda with Alex and Jane Rich. The American capital lived up to its reputation:
It is beautifully laid out, with vast green spaces, trees lining most streets, no skyscrapers, and a high standard of architecture. There is a large district, Georgetown, reminiscent of the best of old Hampstead, with the difference that the buildings are bright and clean, built on a hill above the Potomac river, in a good pinkish-red brick, with white plaster. Immediately outside Washington and even running nearly into the centre, also, are extensive woods in their natural state open to all.
She left for home from New York on the French liner Liberté a changed woman. Within the space of two months, her reputation had been considerably enhanced. The October issue of the Scientific American was out, with Crick’s article, giving her as direct an acknowledgement as she was ever to get during her lifetime for her contribution to the great discovery. ‘Watson and I,’ he wrote, ‘were convinced that we could get somewhere near the DNA structure by building scale models based on the X-ray pattern obtained by Wilkins, Franklin and their coworkers.’ The magazine used her Photograph 51, credited to her, as an illustration. Even better, she was returning home with contacts with American virus laboratories that would form the basis of the greater part of her work for the next three years.
She left, moreover, with virus samples and promises of collaboration from leading scientists around the States, including Wendell Stanley. On board ship, she wrote a thank-you letter to Pauling, saying that she carried home with her ‘the pleasantest possible memories of Cal Tech and its surro
undings and its California sunshine’.
For Rosalind, Americans now fell into the category of foreigners with whom she felt at home. So generously had she been looked after that she was able to refund the National Coal Board £200 of the £250 it had advanced towards her trip.
SIXTEEN
New Friends, New Enemies
(Winter 1954-Summer 1956)
‘She needed a collaborator, and she didn’t have one. Somebody to break the pattern of her thinking, to show her what was right in front of her, to push her up and over.’
THAT ASSESSMENT of why Rosalind missed the last two steps leading to the discovery of DNA’s double helix came from the best collaborator she was ever to have. With Aaron Klug, theoretical physicist, chemist and crystallographer, Rosalind did the finest work of her life.
They met on the stairs leading up to her attic room at 21 Torrington Square early in 1954. Klug had the front room on the top floor. Rosalind’s combined office and lab were at the back. Although Klug had come to Birkbeck in late 1953, they did not become well acquainted at first because Rosalind (when she was not travelling) went to lunch in the senior common room rather than with the rest of the staff in the general canteen, and also because Klug was working on a different project.
One day, however, she showed him the photographs she had taken of the tobacco mosaic virus. ‘From then on,’ Klug said in the autobiography written in connection with his Nobel prize in 1982, ‘my fate was sealed.’ The photographs were beautiful and intriguing; he offered an interpretation of some anomalies. Soon he won permission from Bernal and Harry Carlisle, professor of crystallography, to transfer to virus research. Together he and Rosalind made an ideal team, what Watson found in Crick and she had found in Mering: someone who shared and sharpened her ideas, who could argue with her and share the day-to-day excitement of discovery.
Rosalind Franklin Page 25