Rosalind Franklin

by Brenda Maddox

  She and Don Caspar had two papers coming out in Nature: not joint, but companion publications. In fact, she had written every word of his so that her own could appear. Caspar, like many scientists, found writing up results a tedious chore compared with the fun of experiment. Together their papers proclaimed the news: that the tobacco virus is hollow (his paper) and that along the groove between protein subunits, the RNA winds like an inner lining (her paper). Their respective graphs, when superimposed, nicely revealed the exact location of the RNA: at a radius of about 45 Angstrom from the axis of the intact virus.

  She was still fighting for the future of her group. Even before she left for Madrid, she wrote what was, as scientific correspondence goes, a passionate letter to Slater, telling him that the work her group was doing ‘is concerned with what is probably the most fundamental of all questions concerning the mechanism of living processes, namely the relationship between protein and nucleic acid in the living cell . . . The plant viruses consist of ribonucleic acid and proteins, and provide the ideal system for the study of the in vivo structure of both ribonucleic acid and protein and of the structural relationship of the one to the other.’ There was no doubt, she said, that the results obtained would throw light also onto the problem of animal viruses (such as polio). ‘Moreover, in no other laboratory, either in this country or elsewhere, is any comparable work on virus structure being undertaken.’

  Rosalind’s work was yielding a rich harvest of papers. By mid-July 1956 she had sent a paper to Biochimica et Biophysica Acta comparing three strains of TMV with a cucumber virus. For the same journal, she and Holmes did another paper giving precise measurements about the internal shape of the cucumber virus. And the papers by herself and Caspar that had come out in Nature in May were recognised as technically remarkable for demonstrating the application of the new technique of isomorphous replacement to a non-crystalline specimen.

  More cheering news was that another Gordon Conference beckoned from New Hampshire. She was being invited to one on nucleic acids this time; Don Caspar was going too. Best of all was the glimmer of hope about future funding. Robley Williams, among others, had suggested to her that the ARC was not her only recourse. Why did she not consider applying to the US National Institutes of Health in Washington for funds? She did not take much persuading. The American connection began to look like a lifeline.

  SEVENTEEN

  Postponed Departure

  (May-October 1956)

  THINGS WERE GOING WELL for the extended family in 1956. Ellis Franklin and his sons David and Roland were directors of Keyser Ullmann, a new firm formed by merger of Keyser’s with the banking partnership of Ullmann & Co., Colin was an editor with Routledge and Kegan Paul. There were many grandchildren. Jenifer was running the Goldsbrough Orchestra and working also with the Architects Co-Partnership. Aunt Mamie — Mrs Helen Bentwich - was chairman of the London County Council. Uncle Herbert — Lord Samuel of Toxteth — was the spokesman for Anglo-Jewry, replying to the toast given by the Duke of Edinburgh at a banquet at the Guildhall to celebrate the tercentenary of the Cromwellian settlement of the Jews in England. Rosalind, director of the virus project at Birkbeck College, was off on another invited tour of the United States.

  There was no grubbing around for travel money for her second American trip. The Rockefeller Foundation offered to pay her expenses to the Gordon nucleic acid conference and to tour American laboratories afterwards. Before leaving for the United States in June, she had a medical check-up with Dr Linken of the University College London’s Student Health Association; this was a routine examination required of those exposed to radiation risks in their work. No problems were found. Her worst irritant was the failure of a Newcastle supplier to send the promised representative to regulate her Birkbeck group’s microphotometer. She wrote a stern letter saying she would shortly be leaving the country for several months and her assistants needed to be able to carry on their work in her absence.

  The generous travel grant from the Rockefeller Foundation did not relieve her dependency on the Agricultural Research Council. From Birkbeck Bernal wrote Sir William Slater, the irascible secretary of the ARC, to ask permission for Rosalind to accept the Rockefeller money and to be away for two months visiting virus labs in New York, St Louis, Madison, Wisconsin and Berkeley, California. In a remarkably deferential tone for an egalitarian Communist, Bernal explained to Slater:

  Her work during the past two years has been mainly concerned with materials prepared in these laboratories, and it would be of great value to her work here if she were able to renew her contacts with these laboratories, become better acquainted with the extensive progress made in virus research during the past two years, and make preparations for extending her structural studies to new viruses and virus derivatives. This grant is naturally subject to approval by the Agricultural Research Council of Miss Franklin’s absence, but as it is evidently in the interests of the advancement of her research I should imagine there would be no objection.

  I am accordingly writing to ask your permission for Miss Franklin to be absent for two months, from mid-June to mid-August.

  Slater replied through a deputy that the council had no objection to Miss Franklin accepting a travelling grant for the purposes described and noted her intended absence for two months.

  One of life’s unsung pleasures is the comfortable return to a place once forbiddingly strange. Embarking on her second American trip, Rosalind knew that she must not over-plan her schedule as she had in 1954, but rather to leave room for unexpected invitations. She was prepared for: good weather, good science, healthy outdoor pursuits and warm hospitality. She was primed to spot the differences from her last visit.

  The hopscotch transatlantic flight was easier than before, stopping just at Shannon and Boston in order to reach New York. Hyper-sensitive to light, she brought with her an eye mask to help her attempts to sleep. On arrival she noticed the first change. In the immigration lounge at Boston, there was ‘a table with a copious supply of coffee, for one to help oneself. Such details make a lot of difference to a journey — 5 cups so far this morning.’ From New York she went immediately to Baltimore, to attend an important conference at Johns Hopkins University on the chemical basis of heredity. There she welcomed ‘an abnormal patch of ‘‘cold’’ weather, well down in the seventies’ as well as the array of great names. Being driven back to New York at night, she was surprised, arriving at 2.30 a.m., to find the streets full of life and some shops open.

  With Anne and David Sayre in New York, she went on a food-shopping expedition to an impressive European-style market ‘but on a American scale with wonderful and varied foods of all kinds’. Her first impression, she told her parents, was that the standard of living was even higher than two years before ‘by quite a large amount. All luxuries seem to be commonplace and it is hard to know how to begin to return the lavish hospitality I receive.’

  Then it was back to the familiar grounds of the New Hampton School in New Hampshire. She wrote every few days to Aaron Klug; at last she had someone with whom she could share the scientific information and gossip she was picking up. Still worrying about the financial future of her Birkbeck virus group and of Klug in particular, she had learned that if Klug wished a year in the United States, Don Caspar might be able to help him get to Yale. Also, that Francis Crick would try to find room for him at Cambridge. She had forgotten, she told Klug, to discuss with him in advance how much she ought to tell the scientists she met about their recent results at Birkbeck. ‘However, as it’s better to tell too much than too little I told Jim [Watson] about the microsomes [a small complex within a cell]. He seemed a bit surprised that we’d been able to get them . . . Jim intends to work entirely in microsomes.’

  In New Hampshire, she was prepared to enjoy herself and did. Afternoons were free for walking and swimming. Women scientists were no rarity; there were a good many at the Gordon Conference. One of these, Helga Boedtker (Mrs Paul Doty), a Harvard biochemist, much enjoy
ed talking with Rosalind and was very impressed with her total dedication to science.

  The conference subject — proteins and nucleic acids — was far more interesting than that in 1954 on coal and by now there were many familiar faces, among them Barry Commoner, Erwin Chargaff, Alex Rich, George Gamow, Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat, and Wendell Stanley. Rosalind was now a recognised member of an international fraternity of clever people who talked each other’s language, knew each other’s work and crisscrossed the country and the Atlantic. It was fun seeing the same faces one week in Baltimore, the next in New Hampton or Woods Hole and shortly after in San Francisco or Madrid.

  Don Caspar was there too. She had already seen him at Baltimore and they got on extraordinarily well. Rosalind’s wellguarded heart was beginning to acknowledge a compatibility that went beyond companion papers in Nature. Together they arranged that Caspar would come out to Berkeley to work with her while she was there; also, that she would visit him at his home in Colorado Springs later that summer. In her letters home Caspar’s name was censored out: he was ‘a friend from the East’. To Klug, however, she reported, ‘Don is injecting rabbits now!’

  Caspar was both susceptible to women and inexperienced with them — in his view, ‘because of my strong-willed mother’. He knew he always felt more comfortable with women than men and that he had ‘more rapport with Rosalind than with most of the men I knew’.

  When the Gordon gang lined up for the group photograph, however, it was not Caspar who had pride of place beside Rosalind in the front row, but Maurice Wilkins. The two sat untouching and unsmiling as the others beamed for the camera.

  While she was in New Hampshire, from the Royal Institution in London came an invitation that could scarcely have pleased her more. Sir Lawrence Bragg asked for a model of her work on the helical and spherical viruses to be exhibited in the International Science Hall of the Brussels World’s Fair, scheduled to open the following April. His young staff, Bragg said, had been very impressed by her recent models when he showed them in his recent lectures. She would have financial help for construction and was to think of something on a striking scale, with simple explanations for the general public.

  Going back to Woods Hole on Cape Cod, with familiar faces and without a hurricane, was like a homecoming. She recognised the place as a happy mixture of serious science and seaside resort (the small town holds both the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute). She told her mother, ‘The beach is crowded but exclusively with scientists and their families, and the village and surrounding country are really remarkably unspoilt. Woods Hole itself has a small fishing port which might be anywhere in Europe except that it’s somehow more efficient and huge refrigerated trucks take the fish straight from the boats to New York (about 250 miles) and Boston.’ Writing while sitting on the beach, she observed:

  The quality and quantity of everything in the shops is astonishing, and prices are not high even at the official rate. Food and lodging costs more than at home but apart from this the cost of living is high only because standards are high.

  The sun is hot, and I must get into the water.

  Love from Rosalind.

  From there she went on to her engagements across the continent, then flew to Los Angeles. She had set aside four weeks for the West. UCLA (the University of California at Los Angeles, she reminded her parents) was sheer fun. Sam Wildman, professor of botany, gave a party at his home in Santa Monica where, over martinis, he gave Rosalind a lot of ribbing for being British, and did an imitation of an Englishman saying, ‘Eh wot?’ Rosalind (whom Wildman had found ‘a pushy woman’ in her earlier visit to his lab) took it in good humour, then got her own back. She told the story of the Englishwoman who arrived in America to study American culture. How long would it take?, the visitor asked. ‘A week,’ was the reply, ‘or maybe two.’

  They all had a good laugh. William Ginoza, who worked on TMV, found her ‘a very sweet person, very attractive and very ladylike, I was really taken by her’.

  Wildman’s modern house deeply impressed Rosalind. On a hilltop with views on three sides and behind a lovely garden, it looked ‘like Kew Gardens with everything grown too big’. The house, she told her parents, had been ‘built for its present owner’ (something almost unheard of in England at the time); also, wonder of wonders, a spare bedroom ‘with its own bathroom’. Even better:

  An important feature of this and similar houses in this part of the country is a well-equipped workshop. All the people I meet seem to make nearly all their own furniture. It is a curious result of high standards of living — everybody earns a lot, so nobody can afford to pay anybody else. Private workshops are well-equipped with electric saws, etc., and the furniture is beautifully made.

  It’s a healthier form of competition with one’s neighbours than the size of cars and refrigerators — which seem to be people’s chief concern in the East. In fact, this part of the country retains quite a few of the features of very new country — considerable pioneering spirit and intense local pride.

  Rosalind disapproved, however, of ‘another and rotten new form of inter-neighbour competition in large families’. She attributed the baby boom to the propaganda of baby food and gadget manufacturers: an ‘astonishing illustration of the power of commercial interests’. However, staying with one expectant family, the Albert Siegels, where she slept on the sofa, they talked about the differences between American and British education. Rosalind threw at them a question from the English ii-plus examination: ‘Supply the next three letters in the series OTTFFSS.’ It confounded them all.5

  Games apart, their discussions were wide-ranging and the Siegels were impressed with what Al Siegel called her ‘deep humanity’.

  Was this sweet, laughing, humane guest the same woman who was so aloof in the Birkbeck corridors, curt with the staff, silent at the lunch table and belligerent with the Agricultural Research Council? Memories of Rosalind treasured by those who met her abroad are, like holiday snapshots, bright and smiling, while many of those from England are dark and dour. The American vignettes are perhaps coloured by hindsight, also by a wish to erase the ugly ‘Rosy’ of Watson’s The Double Helix. To William Ginoza, ‘She was not the way Jim Watson said.’ If, however, there were indeed two Rosalinds, Americans got the sunny side.

  After UCLA, she was driven the twenty-six miles east to Pasadena to give a seminar at Caltech. She was rewarded with the mountain trip of her dreams. At Caltech ‘a very brilliant ex-Italian virus man’ (whom she did not identify to her mother but appears from correspondence to have been Renato Dulbecco) asked her if she preferred mountains or the seaside. Controlling her eagerness, she replied ‘mountains’, whereupon he asked if she would like to go camping. Would she mind walking? And carrying sleeping bags as well?

  Would she mind?! With three others she set off at 6 a.m. on a Friday. By 11 a.m.

  we had driven 220 miles to a point 8,500 feet high at the foot of Mt. Whitney (14,495 ft), the highest peak in the USA (outside Alaska), and carrying sleeping bags, blankets, and food for 24 hrs. It’s no good trying to describe mountains they all sound the same, but this was incredibly beautiful, and got consistently and amazingly more beautiful as we went up — huge trees, alpine flowers and small lakes, huge rocky crags with quite a lot of snow remaining, and wide views of the desert behind us. We took the camping stuff up to a most beautiful green plateau at about 10,500 ft and laid out our bedding on a patch of sand under an overhanging rock. Then, after making coffee and eating we went on to a plateau at about 11,800 ft below Mt. Whitney, on a rocky crag sticking up between several big lines of mountains, with a superb view of the whole formation. The weather was, of course, quite perfect and can be relied upon — a thing unknown in the Alps. We got down again to our car shortly before dark, made a huge log fire, and cooked an excellent supper over a minute petrol stove. The expert campers assured me that however many sleeping bags one takes one must expect to be cold at night. So we banked up the fire,
arranged stone walls around it and had it in such a position that a large rock reflected heat back towards the rock we slept under. In spite of air temperatures below freezing, we were all four too hot! Perhaps the most memorable moment of the trip was opening my eyes at dawn to see the great rocky mountain straight in front of me, with its thin pink line of sunshine along its summit.

  We got down to the car about 10 a.m. and were washed, and dressed and talking viruses in the lab by 5 p.m.!

  As Rosalind left Pasadena and headed for San Francisco, she wrote home from a bus stop, ‘I have completely fallen for Southern California.’

  That may have been her last untroubled day. At some point while in California, she was struck by sharp pains in her lower abdomen. The attack lasted two days. She dismissed it; she had always been healthy apart from a bout of jaundice when she was twenty-two. When the sharp pains came back — not once but twice — she went to an American doctor who gave her some painkillers and told her to see a doctor as soon as she got back home. It was exactly the advice she wanted. She was determined to wring the most out of her valuable trip, including return visits to Woods Hole and New York, and she did not want the inconvenience of going into an American hospital. Whatever was wrong with her could wait.

  While in Berkeley, she celebrated her thirty-sixth birthday. She had decided before she left to buy a car, and the gift of money from her parents announced in birthday letters and a telegram on 26 July would go to buying things for the car ‘or alternatively on bribing an examiner to let me pass my test’. (She had no licence yet. Her cousin Ursula, an experienced driver from military service, had accompanied her as she drove twice around Hyde Park Corner trying to exit.)