Rosalind Franklin

by Brenda Maddox

  This information was of more than abstract interest. Once the internal configuration of the virus was known, the way it works could be understood. The protein surrounds and isolates the nucleic acid (RNA) until the virus has infected a host cell. Once inside the cell, the RNA is released from the protein and begins generating new virus — the dreaded infective process.

  Rosalind’s work was fascinating but isolating. No one outside the field could understand it. When she gave her parents two simple books on viruses, she was disappointed when they said they couldn’t understand them. Relief from the intense concentration on work came in various ways. In London she enjoyed the theatre and the cinema, and was a member of the National Film Theatre. As ever, she threw herself into her holidays abroad. In the summer of 1955 she made a return visit to Yugoslavia for a month, and then went on a cycling trip in Normandy with Anne Piper.

  Wherever she was, she found tremendous pleasure in the children of her friends and relations. She was godmother to one of the children of her cousin Catherine (Joseph) Carr and regularly went for weekend visits to the Carr home on the Sussex Downs. Catherine had not only married ‘out’ but further rebelled against her family by choosing a working-class man. Rosalind got along very well with her husband. She loved playing with the children and bringing them presents. To Catherine, her cousin was a single woman who should have married and had children of her own but who was too bright for most of the men she knew.

  Another former school friend, Jean Kerlogue, often stayed at Rosalind’s flat with her family. She was, like so many others, astonished by Rosalind’s amazing ability to produce exactly the right toys and games for the children. Yet for Rosalind choosing good presents, like cooking well, was more than a matter of flair; she did it with the same kind of astute observation and eye for detail that she brought to her experiments.

  Friends tried to introduce her to men. Evi Ellis, who had returned to London from Chicago, was married and living in Notting Hill. She arranged a dinner party to bring together Rosalind and Ralph Milliband of the London School of Economics. Milliband was impressed by Rosalind but nothing came of it. No wonder, perhaps, considering her pervasive unapproachability. Rosalind told Evi that a man who had a flat on the same floor of Donovan Court had asked her, going up in the lift one night, if she would like to come in for a drink. ‘She didn’t seem to know why he had asked her,’ Evi said.

  Various of her married friends have reported hearing Rosalind maintain that women should not have both a career and children because it was unfair to the children. As the 1950s progressed, however, Rosalind saw among her close friends women who managed both very well. Anne Piper had four children and was an executive with the John Lewis Partnership; Mair Livingstone and Denise Luzzati were both doctors and mothers of two. Hearsay apart, however, there is no evidence that Rosalind ever made a deliberate decision to be a scientist rather than a wife. What seems more likely is that she was afraid of intimacy and could find it only in professional relationships or with married couples. Colin Franklin marvelled at Liebe Klug’s tolerance of the closeness between Rosalind and Aaron. But it was no mystery to the Klugs, who long remembered the mechanical fish she brought from America for their small son. ‘She was a good aunt,’ said Klug.

  Once they had deciphered the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus, Rosalind and her team were ready to construct a model. As components, they needed, not the shining metal plates that stood for atoms in the Watson-Crick model of DNA, but something with a longer shape to represent the protuberant subunits of TMV. Bryon Wilson (at that point still working with Rosalind) thought that a bicycle handlebar grip might be about the right shape. As Birkbeck was not far from Oxford Street, he went down to Woolworth’s and asked for some handlebar grips. How many? When Wilson replied ‘two gross [288]’, the salesclerk called the manager. It could only be a lunatic who would ask for the shop’s entire stock. Wilson got them in the end, the model, and many subsequent versions, was constructed and was much in demand for exhibitions.

  Science in the days before the computer and the photocopier involved many tedious jobs. Another of Wilson’s was to go to the mathematics library in Bedford Square and copy down by hand Bessel Function tables. The only handbook available in Birkbeck was in the library and could not be taken away, and Rosalind could hardly be expected to perform such drudgery. In the same spirit, the ARC acceded to Bernal’s request for Rosalind to hire a ‘computer’ — that is, someone to perform computations. It had no wish to have ‘Miss Franklin’s time occupied on computations that could be done, as you suggest, by a girl of eighteen’. As the official rate for an 18-year-old girl in the ‘Machine Assistant’ grade was five pounds a week, the ARC agreed, and a ‘girl’ — a Mrs Cratchby — was hired at £350 a year.

  Before long, Rosalind’s group was working on a whole minestrone of plant viruses — potato, turnip, tomato and pea. Raiding the Birkbeck fridge, Caspar and Klug found crystals left from the 1930s by Bernal and Carlisle. Caspar took the Tomato Bushy Stunt and Klug the Turnip Yellow Mosaic. Rosalind, meanwhile, was scouring the world for virus samples. She asked a virologist at the University of Wisconsin for ten milligrams of Pea Streak. The most convenient form in which to send it, she recommended, was ‘a rather concentrated solution or an ultracentrifuge pellet’. She added that ‘Jim Watson (of the DNA model) is back in Cambridge, and is also interested in these things, and between us we want to look at as many viruses as possible.’

  Watson was indeed back at the Cavendish, to spend the second half of 1955. He had a year’s leave before starting his new post at Harvard as assistant professor of biology so that he might work with Crick on principles of viral structure. As Watson had shown an interest in the potato virus, Crick suggested that Rosalind let Jim know if she were intending to work on this herself. If so, he said (in a cooperative spirit not in evidence two years earlier over DNA), Jim would leave that virus to her to avoid unnecessary duplication.

  Her team was complete, the work was going beautifully, the results were plentiful. But how long could they all stay together? The threat to her group began almost as soon as Rosalind realised how good it was. When Bernal saw Norman Pirie, just as the Agricultural Research Council replaced the Turner and Newall Fellowship as Rosalind’s paymaster, Pirie was still fuming over Rosalind’s paper on TMV’s fixed length. Pirie’s bad temper amused Bernal, who knew all the same that Bawden and Pirie were very influential with the ARC.

  The ARC grant was at most for three years — that is, until the end of 1957, and every item of new equipment and staff had to be haggled over. Before going on holiday, Rosalind made a list of her requirements: a centrifuge, an X-ray tube, a Geiger counter spectrometer, a biochemist, two research assistants and more working space. She also asked to be upgraded from Senior to Principal Scientific Investigator and to have Dr Klug’s future planned for. Klug’s Nuffield grant would run out in a year and he had to leave his flat in a few months. He could not move without knowing whether the ARC would allow Rosalind to use its funds to employ him.

  The early omens were not good. Jim Watson tried to help by speaking to Lord Rothschild, chairman of the ARC, who lived in Cambridge. ‘I’ve had a long talk with Victor Rothschild about your ARC grant,’ Watson wrote Rosalind. ‘His reaction was very sympathetic, indicating that he would write Slater immediately.’ Then Watson added, ‘Perhaps it would be a good idea if we could talk again before anything positive is done so that the mistake of applying for too little could be avoided.’

  Rosalind was bitter that those like herself who did research fulltime had lower academic rank than those who taught as well. Her salary symbolised her discontent. She was still simmering about having been cut back to £1,080 by the Agricultural Research Council.

  In mid-1955, after university salary scales were revised with a view to raising women teachers to parity with men over a period of seven years, Rosalind was entitled to an increase of £150. The college asked that her pay be raised to a total of £1,250. Th
e ARC once again refused, on the grounds of her age.

  She was furious. To Bernal, who she knew would understand, she set out her case:

  My age is 35, I have been doing full-time research continuously for the past 14 years, and obtained my PhD 10 years ago. I cannot believe that there is any rule which prevents the ARC from paying a salary greater than £1,080 p.a. to a person of my age and experience. My present salary is less than I should be receiving if I had made a career either in university teaching or in the Scientific Civil Service, and is also less than the average received by physicists of my age. In view of the fact that I have no security of employment, and nevertheless hold a position of considerable responsibility, this seems to me entirely unjust.

  There was unquestionably an element of choice in Rosalind’s anomalous position. She did not wish to teach, nor to move to a research institution. But her weakness with the Birkbeck hierarchy reflected Bernal’s own. He was at permanent loggerheads with the Master of Birkbeck. To keep his department’s science in the top rank, he depended (a bit like John Randall) on scraping up grants from a wide variety of sources, even the Flour Millers’ Association. The ARC, moreover, as donor agencies went, was both mean in spirit and unaccustomed to doling out its money to women. The shaving off of the paltry twenty pounds from Rosalind’s deserved total was just as insulting as she took it to be. By the end of 1955, the ARC gave it to her, bringing her annual salary to £1,200 — still lower than her entitlement.

  Rosalind often presented the face of an embattled woman to the world but she had a great deal to be embattled about. When she went to see Slater at the ARC at the end of September, fortified with Bernal’s warm endorsement for her group’s rapid progress, she got a stony reception. Slater refused her every single thing she asked for. She needed an X-ray tube? There was one in Sheffield. The only way her work could continue to be financed would be to move it to Cambridge — and only one person could go. Even there, he wanted an absolute halt to the use of virus samples — from Berkeley, Tubingen or anywhere else abroad: he strongly disapproved of what he called ‘second-hand material’. (This ludicrous and provincial diktat was, in its way, as unethical as Randall’s telling Rosalind in 1953 to stop thinking about DNA. Science, of all intellectual disciplines, knows no geographical boundaries.)

  On her own position, moreover, Slater would not consider raising her to the grade of ‘Principal Scientific Investigator’. When she said she ought to have had that title four years before, he disagreed; to reach that at thirty-one, he said, it would be only for the ‘exceptionally distinguished’. Calling her ‘my dear’, he treated her like a little girl and told her that she ought to work under the constant guidance of a biochemist because otherwise she could not hope to understand the biological side of her work.

  Rosalind argued back, point by point. Heated rebuttal from a woman was not what Slater welcomed. He refused to discuss Klug’s future. He was badly upset by her suggestion that the ARC provide lab space elsewhere in the University of London: that was the university’s business. She left in tears, and telephoned Klug in distress from Piccadilly Underground station.

  Making careful notes of this bitter meeting in order to represent her requests in writing later in the year, Rosalind commented to herself, ‘Presumably somebody has protested my work with Commoner.’ She would not have had to look far for a suspect. Norman Pirie had many reasons to object to her work quite apart from disagreeing with her TMV measurements. Because of his left-wing views, he could not travel to the United States and was cut off from friendly collaboration with American virologists. He had particularly cool relations with one of Rosalind’s most helpful contacts, Wendell Stanley of the Virus Laboratory at Berkeley. Stanley, unlike Pirie, had won a Nobel prize for virus research, and had given Rosalind virus samples and was credited in her published papers.

  Defiant in the face of Slater’s blatant parochialism, Rosalind put in her progress report for the year 1955 that her group was in close touch with the virus-structure studies being carried out ‘in the laboratories of Berkeley (USA) and Tubingen (Germany)’ who ‘regularly send us their new preparations for study, and our results are closely interconnected with theirs’. Until her group could make its own preparations, she said, ‘we must remain dependent on the generosity of research workers overseas’.

  She stressed that just as important as the new centrifuge urgently needed was an agreement to put Dr Klug on the ARC payroll: ‘his position is such that he must make decisions very shortly about other future possibilities. It is therefore important that a decision be made.’

  Rosalind had tied her future to Aaron Klug’s. His friend, the writer Dan Jacobson, observed the relationship. ‘Meeting Rosalind was crucial for Aaron,’ said Jacobson, who had come to London from South Africa (via Israel) about the same time in the early 1950s. ‘It was the turning point in Aaron’s career. He was dissatisfied at Cambridge, could not see the way ahead and admired Bernal despite his politics. And Rosalind was fascinated by Aaron. It was a great bond that they were both Jewish — and not the same kind of Jew. They thought the same way — but differently, rather, they understood each other’s minds.’

  Jacobson, expanding on his theme, said: ‘It is not too strong to say that Rosalind loved Aaron. Not in a sexual way. It was a meeting of minds — and of two very different kinds of mind. Aaron was imaginative and playful and artistic as well as a superb scientist. He was an expert on movie Westerns and wrote a skit with me. She scolded Aaron and told him that play-writing was a waste of time for a scientist.’

  Part of Rosalind’s fascination was for the Klugs’ bohemian style of life. Klug felt she was shocked by the way they were living — at the top of a shabby five-storey Victorian house north of Regent’s Park, washing up in the kitchen in front of guests, with friends from South Africa staying in the attic. When she was there, she would sit with her straight back on the edge of her chair. She never, as the others did, sat on the floor.

  Grant worries apart, Rosalind was at the top of her profession and enjoying it. Invitations poured in, and her contacts were wide. She held an impromptu tea party at her flat on the occasion of a conference on semi- and non-crystalline materials held by the Institute of Physics on 18 November 1955. Jacques Mering was there from Paris; also Drago Grdenic from the University of Zagreb (whom she advised to look up her mathematician friend, Simon Altmann, at Oxford) and Alan Mackay, a bright spark from Birkbeck Crystallography.

  In 1956 she was off on another round of conferences, none of which slowed the steady flow of papers from her lab in various combinations of authorship — Franklin and Klug, Klug and Holmes, Klug and Finch, Franklin and Holmes, Franklin, Klug and Holmes. Even when in London she strove to keep herself informed as widely as possible. Fred Dainton, her former Cambridge supervisor, was touched when she turned up to his lecture on a subject utterly unrelated to her own research. ‘She seemed to me much more womanly, much less prickly,’ he said, even capable of ‘a little gentle teasing’.

  At many scientific meetings, it goes without saying, she was the only woman on the programme. Most of the women present were wives, expected to go shopping or sightseeing during the formal sessions and to join the men only for social gatherings. At an important invitation-only conference held by the Ciba Foundation in London in March 1956 on ‘The Biophysics and Biochemistry of Viruses’, the printed programme advised: ‘The wives of overseas members (but not those of British members) are invited to join the group for lunch.’

  Rosalind stood out on the otherwise all-male select guest list of thirty-four, which included Watson, Crick, Wilkins, Bawden, Pirie, Caspar, Klug, and Robley Williams of the Virus Laboratory at Berkeley. She delivered, on behalf of her co-authors Klug and Holmes, a paper on ‘X-ray Diffraction studies of the Structure and Morphology of Tobacco Mosaic Virus’. Williams, who was at Cambridge on sabbatical, led off the discussion on the question Rosalind’s paper had raised: whether there was just one RNA molecule in the TMV virus or many. Watso
n and Crick came in on Rosalind’s side and Pirie threw sharp and witty barbs.

  A few weeks later much of the same cast reassembled in Madrid. Until then Rosalind had avoided Spain, out of hostility to Franco, but science overrode politics. With an International Union of Crystallography symposium on ‘Structures on a scale between the atomic and microscopic dimensions’, with social receptions in the Plaza de la Villa and the Hotel Wellington, with her name listed once more among the top in the field, and the promise of a week of excursion afterwards, she could hardly wait. She wrote to Adrienne Weill, ‘As I have never been there, I would be happy to go anywhere at all — in the cities, to the seaside, to the caves at Altamira, etc., etc.’

  The symposium was a jolly gathering of professional intimates. A photograph shows an assured Rosalind in ideal circumstances, flanked by her three favourite scientists — Crick, Caspar, and Klug — as well as Odile Crick and John Kendrew, in an exciting new foreign venue. When the meeting was over, Rosalind decided to go with Francis and Odile Crick on a tour of southern Spain. She tried to get Klug to come along, but failed. Having read Hemingway, Klug was determined — in the face of Rosalind’s strong disapproval — to remain in Madrid to go to the bullfight. So in a threesome once again, she went to Toledo, Seville and Cordoba. She got on very well with Odile Crick, but did not indulge in any feminine confidences and they never conversed in French. The couple found her great fun. They knew nothing about her private life. ‘But,’ said Crick, ‘did anyone?’