Rosalind Franklin

by Brenda Maddox

  The major opposition Rosalind Franklin had to cope with was not from her scientific colleagues, nor even from King’s College, London (an Anglican foundation, it should be noted, and therefore inherently biased against women), but from her affluent, educated and sympathetic family who felt that scientific research was not the proper thing for a normal girl.

  Crick did not know Rosalind’s family. He did not know they were Jewish — certainly a major element in her feeling that King’s was ‘inherently biased’ against her. In reality, Ellis Franklin never opposed his daughter’s career. There would have been no point. He and his wife did not try to stop her climbing dangerous peaks, moving to France, hitchhiking alone through Israel: Rosalind did what she wanted to do. However, she could see for herself that she was the odd one out in a family of intermarrying cousins and unsalaried wives.

  Crick was nearer the mark when telling Anne Sayre in 1970 in a taped interview that Rosalind, as he came to know her through her TMV research, had ‘a good, hard, analytical mind, really first-class’, but that she lacked intuition — ‘Or mistrusted it. Perhaps mistrusted it.’

  Rosalind did mistrust intuition, with a wariness for which her Jewishness is as relevant as her gender. In The Cousinhood: The Anglo-Jewish Gentry published in 1971 not long after The Double Helix, its author Chaim Bermant writes:

  A Jew often feels compelled to try that much harder than his colleagues; a woman in a man’s world has a similar compulsion. Rosalind perhaps tried too hard on both scores and approached her work with a jealous determination which some of her colleagues found alarming. She seemed to carry a constant air of embattlement about her, and felt that her first-class ability and achievements were not given due recognition.

  Blame the victim. The belief that Rosalind brought her fate on herself extends even to her cancer. It is often suggested that careless exposure to radiation was the cause of her disease. However, such anecdotal evidence as there is of her taking exceptional risks is counter-balanced by praise of her extreme caution as a scientist, also by the widely repeated observation that all laboratory staff in the 1950s did things that, in Ken Holmes’s words ‘today would bring down the wrath of the safety inspectorate’.

  It may be relevant that others in the Franklin family have suffered from cancer. Possibly they fell victim to the ‘Ashkenazi gene’ — two genes actually, BC1 and BC2, found to be responsible for the disproportionate percentage of cancer deaths among Jews of northern European descent, with a particularly high incidence of female breast cancer.

  For all the retributive gestures, Rosalind continues to be overlooked in accounts of the discovery of the double helix. In Bryan Sykes’s Seven Daughters of Eve, published in 2001, about the genetic markers of European inheritance, Sykes describes how Watson and Crick worked out the molecular structure of DNA:

  This entailed making long crystalline fibres of DNA and bombarding them with X-rays . . . The deflected X-rays made a regular pattern of spots on the film . . . After many weeks spent building different models . . . Watson and Crick suddenly found one which fitted exactly with the X-ray pattern.

  Whose X-ray pattern? Long crystalline fibres made by whom? Bombarded by whom? Film owned by whom? Rosalind seems doomed to remain the invisible woman in many minds, the faceless nurse who hands the surgeon the scalpel.

  The air of injustice hanging over the name of Rosalind Franklin has inspired some belated acts of contrition. Immediately following her death, Don Caspar, Klug and Bernal led efforts to organise a memorial fund in Rosalind’s name. That never got off the ground. Instead, a registered charity, the Rosalind Franklin Bequest, was created out of the residue of her estate, about £5,000, which gave small grants to deserving applicants.7

  That apart, silence followed for many years until Anne Sayre’s combative biography of Franklin in 1974 took aim at the Watson caricature. Awareness was aroused, but slowly. In 1984, St Paul’s Girls’ School recognised her as one of its most illustrious pupils. The Rosalind Franklin Design, Technology and Engineering Workshop was opened at a ceremony attended by her family and former colleagues. (At the event Holmes, who came over from Heidelberg for the occasion, ran into Gosling, then professor of medical physics at Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospitals, and said, ‘So you were in love with her too?’ — a light-hearted remark that did not conceal Holmes’s unhealed grief. As he wrote to Anne Sayre in 1971, he was unable to help with her book: ‘The circumstances of her death and her bravery during her illness were such that my feelings about Rosalind are still very intense.’)

  As her posthumous reputation grew, Rosalind was accorded a highly sympathetic portrayal in 1987 in the BBC Horizon programme’s dramatisation, ‘Life Story’, with Juliet Stevenson and Alan Howard as the ill-matched Franklin and Wilkins, Jeff Goldblum as Watson and Tim Piggott-Smith as Crick. (Wellresearched, its scientific details are impeccable, and J.T. Randall wears exactly the kind of bow tie he sported in the early 1950s. The film, nonetheless, to Aaron Klug made Rosalind ‘nun-like’, whereas the Rosalind he knew was vivacious, opinionated and fun-loving. Anne Sayre too, who found Rosalind a sparkling and amusing friend, disliked the film’s ‘droopy drudge . . . sitting up half the night with her Beevers-Lipson strips’. Anne remembered well that Rosalind did do hundreds of hours of hand calculations, but ‘with concentration and burning enthusiasm . . . she did have real insight, she did know where she was headed, she did have unusual capacity to interpret small clues’. The film that needed to be made, said New Statesman, ‘is of a brilliant woman trying to make her way in a man’s world, having her work used behind her back, and finally being misrepresented in a book published when she was no longer alive to reply’.

  Honours continue to accumulate. In 1998 the National Portrait Gallery hung Rosalind’s photograph beside that of Wilkins and beneath those of Watson and Crick. In 1992 English Heritage placed a blue plaque on the dark-red mansion block of Donovan Court, Drayton Gardens, South Kensington. A Heritage spokesman said, ‘Franklin never received adequate recognition. We are particularly anxious to commemorate important women as 90 per cent of the 600 plaques put up in the last 125 years are to men.’ In 1995, sixty-seven years after failing to honour her with an obituary in the Newnham Roll, Newnham College dedicated a graduate residence in her name and placed a bust of Rosalind Franklin in its garden.

  At the Science Museum in South Kensington, the TMV model shown in the Science Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair was acquired for exhibition and kept there until 1964 when Max Perutz took it to Cambridge.

  As if to outdo all the rest, at the beginning of the new millennium, King’s College London, in a genuflection bordering on political correctness, honoured her in March 2000 with the dedication of its new Franklin-Wilkins Building, opened by the Chancellor of London University, the Princess Royal. During the ceremony, Francis Crick appeared on video, and Watson came in person, to say that her contribution was critical to their discovery. The building thus links the names of a professor who had worked and taught there for fifty-three years with the name of an associate worker who had left (or been pushed out) after little more than two years and rarely spoken of with any warmth within its walls before the name of the refurbished warehouse on the South Bank was chosen.

  ‘Waarom kreeg “Rosy” geen Nobelprijs?’ The question posed by the Dutch newspaper Vrij Nederland on 15 August 1998 will not go away, even if the answer is simple. ‘Rosy’ never won the Nobel prize because, when Watson, Crick and Wilkins got theirs in 1962, she was dead. The prize is never awarded posthumously. The inevitable rephrasing — ‘If Rosalind had lived, would she have won the Nobel prize?’ — is meaningless and belongs in the Alternative Futures file along with ‘What if Kennedy had not gone to Dallas?’

  When the question is rephrased to an assertion, ‘They would have had to give it to her rather than to Wilkins had she lived,’ the rejoinder is easy. Not at all. ‘They’ are not compelled to do anything except respect the Nobel rules, which do not allow more than three peo
ple to share a prize in any single category. The Nobel committee in Stockholm chooses the winners from the recommendations sent in from each country by, among others, its national laureates — a system which encourages fraternity.

  Indeed, when Wilkins’s name was announced as a co-winner with Watson and Crick in 1962, Sir Lawrence Bragg wrote Max Perutz (who won the Nobel for physics that same year) of his ‘great joy’ that Wilkins had been linked with the other two. ‘It will undo the bitterness he [Wilkins] felt when Crick and Watson proposed their structure,’ Bragg wrote. ‘I pressed strongly for it in my recommendation.’ Bragg was very influential in determining British nominations. It is hard to believe that, nudged possibly by J.T. Randall, Bragg would not have put Wilkins’s name forward instead of Rosalind’s. Wilkins was senior to Rosalind, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and had done the serious DNA preliminary work at King’s that led to hers.

  Speculation is hardly required to imagine the course Rosalind’s life would have taken had she been less unlucky. Her long struggle to get her Virus Research Project on a permanent footing succeeded in 1960 when, with the Medical Research Council taking over from the US Public Health grant as backer, Klug, as head of the group, moved with Holmes and Finch to the new MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge. There Klug and Finch remained for the rest of their careers. Holmes, the one who most directly continued Rosalind’s work on the structure of TMV, moved in 1968 to the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg and carried on his research from there.

  Nobel statistics do not favour the female. In 1956 when Dorothy Hodgkin FRS solved the structure of Vitamin B12, the prize for chemistry that year was divided between the head of her department and a Russian chemist. For year after year after that, knowing she had been nominated several times, Hodgkin waited for the telephone to ring. It had not rung by 1962 when Max Perutz received his prize, embarrassed (he said later) to have his prize before she had hers. He used his Nobel credentials to lobby for her. At last, with the special honour of being a sole winner, Hodgkin received the prize for chemistry in 1964, the fifth woman scientist ever to win in the six decades of the prize. The attendant publicity called her an ‘affable-looking housewife’ and ‘mother of three’. At the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Nobel prize in 1975, she was the only representative of fourteen women laureates from all subjects, including peace and literature. She was used to being the only woman at gatherings, she said. ‘After all, women have come rather late to science.’

  When the centenary of the Nobel prize was celebrated in 2001, Hodgkin remained the only British woman scientist to have won it. A conspicuous absentee from the Nobel pantheon of science is Jocelyn Bell, the Cambridge astronomer who discovered pulsars — energy emissions constituting a new class of stars. She was a graduate assistant at Cambridge when she made her discovery. The Nobel prize for physics in 1974, however, honoured her professor, Antony Hewish, for ‘recognising the meaning’ (in the words of the Encyclopaedia Britannica) of his assistant’s observations.

  Rosalind’s name was praised from the Nobel platform in Stockholm but not by Watson, Crick or Wilkins. When they gave their Nobel addresses in 1962, only Wilkins uttered her name at all, mentioning her and Alex Stokes as two people at King’s College London who ‘made very valuable contributions to the X-ray analysis’. Sometime later, Randall (by then Sir John) wrote Gosling, ‘I have always felt that Maurice’s Nobel lecture did rather less than justice to this setting [Randall’s biophysics lab at King’s] and particularly to the contribution of yourself and Rosalind.’

  In 1982, however, when Aaron Klug received the prize for chemistry, he spoke movingly of his late colleague. Rosalind Franklin, he said, had introduced him to the study of viruses and set an example of tackling large and difficult problems: ‘Had her life not been cut tragically short, she might well have stood in this place on an earlier occasion.’

  Klug has been Rosalind’s staunchest defender. Several months following the publication of The Double Helix, he wrote a long article for Nature, saying that Watson did not pretend to tell more than one side of the story. As ‘her last and perhaps closest scientific colleague’, he said, he had carefully studied her laboratory notebooks and found that, far from being anti-helical (as Watson, Crick and Wilkins continued to maintain) she had set out the evidence for a helical structure for DNA as early as her Turner and Newall report in February 1952. Although she had retreated from this position for the A form because of some of her subsequent findings, by the February and March of 1953, she was far nearer to solving the structure than anyone had realised:

  She would have solved it, but it would have come out in stages. For the feminists, however, she has become a doomed heroine, and they have seized upon her as an icon, which is not, of course, her fault. Rosalind was not a feminist in the ordinary sense, but she was determined to be treated equally just like anybody else.

  Klug’s was a robust defence, strengthened in 1974 by a startling discovery, which he also reported in Nature, of a missing manuscript dated 17 March 1953, which showed that Rosalind was even closer to coming upon the truth of the double helix than even he had realised. Tactfully, however, perhaps out of respect for his fellow FRSs, Klug did not mention how irregularly her data had been obtained, and how inadequate had been her formal acknowledgement, in 1953 and 1954, and in the 1962 Nobel addresses of the DNA trio.

  Nor did Klug declare his personal interest in her defence. Klug owed Rosalind a debt of honour. By making him her principal beneficiary, she changed his life, made it possible for him and his wife to buy a house and to stay in Britain where he rose to great heights. He became successively Sir Aaron, winner of the Nobel prize, holder of the Order of Merit (a tribute to greatness, in the personal gift of the Queen) and, from 1995 to 2000, President of the Royal Society.

  Some criticism belongs to the Nobel prize itself. Founded in 1901 it is the world’s most coveted intellectual award, but it is also arbitrary, inherently unfair and possibly damaging. Many who deserved it have not got it; many who didn’t, have. The literature prize offers glaring examples: Thomas Mann, Leo Tolstoy and James Joyce were passed over, Somerset Maugham and Pearl Buck honoured. In science the effect is particularly baleful, because science is collegial. As research becomes progressively more expensive, moreover, scientific discoveries are harder to attribute to particular people. The Nobel prize, by canonising individuals, disguises the truth that they are all, in Newton’s famous phrase, standing ‘on giants’ shoulders’ and on each other’s as well.

  The list of deserving scientists who never got the summons to Stockholm is long, glittering and bitter, and contains a number of women: the physicist Lise Meitner and the Cambridge astronomer Jocelyn Bell. Oswald Avery, who discovered that DNA was the genetic material, was deprived of the prize by the persistent and unfair criticism of his Rockefeller colleague Alfred Mirsky. In the view of Erwin Chargaff, whose finding of the base pairs of DNA went uncelebrated, ‘Avery should have gotten two Nobel prizes for his discovery. I have no complaint when I think of Avery.’

  Such omissions and exclusions would not matter except that the Nobel prize changes lives, and divides colleague from colleague by touching the winners with a magic of which the generous prize money is only part.

  Rosalind Franklin did not have her eyes on the prize. Nor did she worry about having been outrun in a race that no one but Watson and Crick knew was a race. She died proud of her world reputation both in coal studies and in virus research, and of her list of published papers that would do credit to any scientific career, let alone one that ended at the age of thirty-seven. Had she not gone into science, the early 1950s would have had little understanding of what kinds of coal make graphite, slower knowledge of the A and B forms of DNA and of the characteristics of TMV. There would have been a delay in getting to the DNA structure and in the revolution that followed. The careers of her collaborators and of the Nobel trio who benefited from her data could have fallen far short of the heights they
reached.

  Rosalind knew her worth. With every prospect of going on to further significant achievement and, possibly, personal happiness, she was cheated of the only thing she really wanted: the chance to complete her work. The lost prize was life.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Agar, Delia M., ‘Some Comments on Rosalind Franklin and DNA’, Newnham College Library No. 828.77, 3° Mar. 1979.

  Anon, ‘Dr Rosalind Franklin’, The Times, 19 Apr. 1958, p. 3.

  Anon, ‘Twenty-one years of the double helix’, Nature, 248, p. 721, 26 Apr. 1974.

  Astbury, W.T., and Bell, Florence O., ‘X-ray Studies of Nucleic Acids in tissues’, Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology, I, pp. 66— 76 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947).

  ‘X-Ray Study of Thymonucleic Acid’, letter to Nature, 141, No. 3573, pp. 747—8, 23 Apr. 1938.

  Avery, Oswald T., MacLeod, Colin M., and McCarty, Maclyn, ‘Studies on the Chemical Transformation of Pneumococcal Types’, Journal of Experimental Medicine, Vol. 79, pp. 137—58 (received for publication, I Nov. 1943).

  Bailes, Howard, Once a Paulina (London: James and James, 2°°°).

  Bair, Deirdre, Simone de Beauvoir (London: Jonathan Cape, 199°).

  Bangham, D.H., and Franklin, Rosalind E., ‘Thermal Expansion of Coals and Carbonised Coals’, Transactions of the Faraday Society, 42B, pp. 289—94, 1946.

  Bangham, D.H., Franklin, R.E., Hirst, W., and Maggs, P., ‘A structural model for coal substance’, British Coal Utilisation Research Association, Fuel, xxviii-i°, pp. 231—7.

  Baon, G.E., and Franklin, Rosalind E., ‘The a[alpha] dimension of graphite’, Acta Cryst., 4, p. 561, 1951.