Mileva worked on a scientific project with a colleague and signed her papers Einstein instead of Maric. Another friend asked why. Because we are ein stein, she said, we are one stone.
In Einstein’s first papers on the special theory of relativity, Mileva signed as Maric, as co-author, according to the Russian physicist Abram Joffe, who saw all submissions to The Annals of Physics, where Einstein’s breakthroughs were published. The papers were published under Albert’s name only; the original manuscript somehow disappeared. After their divorce, when he won the Nobel Prize in 1921, he gave all the prize money to Mileva. He spent the rest of his time trying to create his doomed unified field theory, and she retired into obscurity. Let me ask you a question: Does God play dice with women’s lives?
Well, that was a long time ago, Ollie. Beyond the usurpation of Curie and the tragic mystery of Mileva Maric Einstein must stand—who? A contemporary woman? That makes sense. And let’s rig it even more—let’s posit a scientist who’s an unmarried woman, single and independent, tough-minded. None of this soap-opera, weeping-into-the-beakers stuff! Surely, for a woman scientist like this, life and work would be easier?
I turn again and slide my finger blindly till it stops at the famous team of Crick and Watson and immediately the name “Rosalind Franklin” leaps to my mind. It would not do so normally. The only reason it leaps to mine is because here in my hands is a biography of Rosalind Franklin by a woman named Anne Sayre, a friend of Rosalind’s. OK, we are in a different, more contemporary time, the fifties—close to our own. We expect that women will be more accepted in the academy, in the laboratory, right? We expect that this accomplished woman, educated at Cambridge, whose chosen milieu was biology—or rather, what we would now call molecular biology (emphasis on X-ray diffraction, with specialized work on subcrystalline materials)—would have an easier road?
Rosalind Franklin, after all, had claimed her independence early. She did not marry; she devoted her life to science, and when she went from Cambridge to the prestigious Randall Laboratory at King’s College, she had set her goal: to do research on DNA. Everybody who knew Rosalind knew that she was tough, the stuff out of which great scientists are made; hers was the illuminating research on DNA—she, in fact, produced on an X ray the first image of the double helix. Why, then, don’t we all know her name, the way we know Crick’s and Watson’s?
Because she did not discover DNA; they did. Or at least that’s the way it’s gone down in the history books. Yet her research was central to the discovery of DNA—what happened? What happened was this. Anne Sayre sets it out carefully. Rosalind did not get along with her Randall associate, Maurice Wilkins. Wilkins refused to view Rosalind as anything other than his assistant, though she was brought into the Randall lab to pursue her own research. To say that there was friction between them would be like describing the Titanic as a minor boating accident. Wilkins had enormous trouble accepting a woman as a partner in science, particularly a woman of confrontational style with no time to flatter the male ego.
Meanwhile, over at Cambridge, the team of Watson and Crick decided to jump into the search for DNA, which Franklin and Wilkins had begun at King’s. Watson attended Franklin’s seminars; the two utilized her already completed research in their experiments. There is nothing to indicate that Rosalind ever knew, ever noticed. Watson got to know Wilkins and sympathized with him for having to put up with such a shrew. Sayre’s book says he commented that Wilkins was being put through “emotional hell” by Rosalind’s unorthodox temperament.
On February 6, 1953, Watson paid a visit to Maurice Wilkins at King’s College and Wilkins allowed him to look at an X-ray photograph that belonged to Rosalind Franklin. The X ray showed a B-form diffraction pattern suggesting a helical pattern containing two, three, or four coaxial nucleic-acid chains per helical unit and having the phosphate groups, or the bases, in the center and the backbone on the outside of the structure. When I read this description (Rosalind’s own, straight from Anne Sayre’s book) I get the shivers. Rosalind was right there. She had it in her hands. We have Wilkins himself describing it:
I had this photograph and there was a helix right on the picture, you couldn’t miss it. I showed it to Jim, and I said, “Look, there’s the helix, and that damned woman just won’t see it.” He picked it up, of course.
Hey, he picked it up. Later, Wilkins said that he regretted having shown the photograph to Watson. He said that “perhaps” he should have asked Rosalind’s permission. No shit. I have to admit, I’m looking at this series of events from the perspective of current attitudes on what we call scooping in up-to-the-minute science. Things were a little freer then—but showing someone’s research to a competitor? Without asking permission? It’s true that now scientists “edit” their conference seminars, only hinting at “hard” information, so as not to hand the competition one’s edge. Submissions to technical scientific journals are logged in with a date and a time, and remain unopened until the last minute, to protect the authors from a scoop. Rivalry is fierce—research grants and fellowships, prize money, etc., are limited; it’s ugly out there.
But Rosalind was working away, unaware of Wilkins’s “tip” to Watson. If it had mattered to her, I can’t imagine what form her protest would have taken: Her lab was enamored of regular “interim reports.” In December of 1952, the head of the lab had published a report covering recent work done and included her findings. And even before Christmas the same year, Wilkins sent drawings of the “B” patterns in squid sperm to Crick. Wilkins was a real hot source. And, the biggest question in this biographical sleuthing: What became of an interim annual report written by Rosalind Franklin a full year before Wilkins showed Watson the X ray—in fact, interpreting the B-form diffraction pattern as a “helical structure.” She did know. But why did she wait?
I think I know. But here’s what happened in history. On February 5, 1953, Watson and Crick had nothing in mind to help them build a definitive model of DNA. But between February 6 and February 28 they learned enough to build the famous “Tinkertoy” model every schoolkid has seen, the one I built in my basement: the double spiral staircase. And you see, that’s it, that’s why Rosalind took longer. They were biologists—they loved to build atomic models: fast instructive visual aids. And this was a prefab Arthurian tale, with crusading knights, and a Holy Grail built like a twin helix. Rosalind Franklin was a crystallographer, a theoretician; she was interested in taking some time to demonstrate the structure of DNA on X rays, in crystal molecular formation. She was working on the integrity of each section of the canvas, like Cézanne painting: a scientist deep in her subject. And as far as a “race” goes, she had no notion at all that anyone outside Randall had access to her information.
In 1962, the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology was shared by Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins—in recognition of their work on DNA. Rosalind Franklin’s name was missing. But then, Rosalind was missing in general. On April 16, 1958, Rosalind Franklin died of cancer. She was thirty-seven years old.
I let my hand drop, glancing up at the top shelves, where I know stands a biography of Barbara McClintock, whose research into “jumping genes,” retrotransposons (using corn, plain old kernels of corn, as her model!) changed genetic inquiry. Her research led to high-resolution bonding techniques, but she was laughed at and ignored for years. Finally, in the sixties, her work was looked at objectively and, in 1983, she was awarded the Nobel Prize.
But I’m sick of this now. This glut of ... what? Sexist Highlights of Science History? The SH of SH? At least my theory is my theory.
I look up at the wall clock. Ten-thirty. Jay, says a little tin voice. I shake myself. Jay. I think of the way his eyes close, in a trusting manner, just before he stutters. I hear his voice, its musical timbre. His laugh. Then I shake my head.
My theory, I think. I look at the clock again, then pick up my bag. I’ve made my decision. I’m going over to USC to talk to (another name for my litany!) Professor L
orraine Revent Atwater.
Chapter 14
I FOUND PROFESSOR Atwater’s office with some difficulty. She was on mini-sabbatical from the USC chemistry department; she was at work on a new project and had squirreled herself and her computers away somewhere in the warren of small offices in an offshoot of the chem building.
I knocked hesitantly at the door, which was half open, and blinked into the shadowy interior, where two (no, three!) leaping computer screens sat stacked up like animated building blocks. She was at work, bent over a yellow legal pad lit by the spotlight of a gooseneck lamp—she didn’t hear or see me.
I’d met L.R. (as she asked me to call her; “I’ve been ‘L.R.’ since grad school,” she said) at a seminar-conference at UCLA when I’d first come to L.A., and we’d stayed in touch. We were interested in the same things. Months into my chirality theorizing, we’d run into each other at Radio Shack—and, as if there were a kind of theory-ESP in the universe, she began telling me what she was working on. It was amazing, remarkable: We were both at work on chirality and we were both on our way to the conclusion that testing the tetrahedral molecules’ chirality in deep space was the place to begin.
There was no competition here. I liked L.R. and I was interested in what she’d come up with. I didn’t want to be scooped, and I would never let myself be scooped in the way Rosalind Franklin was—but this was different: L.R. and I both believed that chirality was such an evolving model that we didn’t worry too much about reproducing each other’s results. Besides, I was the neophyte; I was newer than the newest kid on the block. She had superior age, knowledge, and experience. It was not a Q-type feeling that I had here, but a simple hard look at what was up. Plus she was a woman—never maternal, not even sisterly, but she offered me the reinforcement one gives a respected if younger colleague of the same gender.
When I first met her I felt renewed in my conviction that theory’s elegance and abstraction needed just this kind of champion. Way back in the sixties, when I was just a glimmer of a kid-scientist, she’d actually found practical ways to solve Schrödinger’s equation on molecules—a formula that had been around since 1923, that made perfect sense, but that could never be solved for the descriptions of things as complex as chiral molecules.
The equation went like this:
Simple as pie! (Or psi.) It described molecular phenomena perfectly, but no one could get it to work practically. Lorraine Revent Atwater did. In 1965, at a time when computers were like electronic dinosaurs compared to our present versions, she calculated approximate properties of molecules using Schrödinger. She got it to work. She’d stay up all night calculating, she told me, then she’d fill in the results on the blackboard behind her, like a baseball scoreboard. Each morning she’d post a new set of “scores.”
Back in 1965, listening to the Jefferson Airplane, I read an article in Science about L.R. and the Schrödinger breakthrough. So when I finally met her, I chalked one up myself: I’d met a brain woman who was thought of as cold. This told me she was no-nonsense, the real thing—a theorist who didn’t apologize for the detached, classical beauties of theory, the way my friend Q had. When I felt desolate, I thought of her. For though she’d never been intimate pals with me, or offered me wild enthusiasm for my ideas, she stood steadily by me. And she gave me hope. After all, she existed.
She looked up suddenly—a large, hook-nosed woman with short thinning grey-brown hair and an air of physical perfunctoriness. Great radiant eyes behind her wire-rim glasses. She didn’t miss a beat, but jumped right in: no small talk.
“Think about it, Esme—the problem is theological, isn’t it? A question of seeing it wrong because you’ve shifted your origin.”
“Yeah. But I think it’s God who keeps jumping around, not us.”
She offered me, with enormous delicacy, a partially eaten ham sandwich. I wolfed it down.
“You need to be a perissodactyl. You know”—she winked and waggled her fingers at me—“have fingers or toes in odd places, to spin this Frisbee.”
“The tetrahedrals could use a kind of special torque, couldn’t they?” I swallowed the last of the sandwich and she handed me a dented Coke can and I swigged from it. “Or, you’re right—maybe a perissodactyl, something providing the spin that’s morphically unfamiliar, a new kind of God? I see why you say the problem’s theological!”
“Right,” she said, nodding, smiling. She paused. “I don’t know if I’d call it torque exactly.”
“No?” I crumpled up the Coke can in my fist, took careful but show-off aim and watched my empty hit the edge too hard and bounce off. I shook my head and shrugged.
“We’re just about at the same place with this stuff, aren’t we?” I said. “Though we didn’t think this would happen.”
“I think so. You got third-order dispersion forces, mixed electromagnetic forces all producing the same results.”
“And at shorter distances, calculations lead to large discriminations, of the order of the thermal energy. Easily interpreted in terms of specific atom-atom reactions.”
We lapsed into silence, running over the spinning architectures in our heads.
Then she crumpled up a piece of paper, took aim, and hit the wastebasket, with just a little more spin than I’d applied. The paper wad danced around the circumference of the basket, wobbled, fell in.
She smiled again. “Torque,” she said.
“I think we’re close.”
“We’re close to the three-center attachment theory of Ogston. Whether our model has implications for chiral selectivity or for homochiral preferences in natural selection remains open to question.”
“Nevertheless.”
“Nevertheless.”
We sat and talked some more; I thanked her for “lunch.” As I went out the door, she called me back.
“Does it bother you that we’re neck-and-neck here, Esme?”
“No,” I said, honestly. “Does it bother you?”
She sighed, looked away for a second, picking at her teeth with a paper clip. She had big teeth. She looked like Eleanor Roosevelt, I thought suddenly. Then she faced me.
“I’ve lived longer than you,” she said very slowly. She sounded exhausted. “I’ve worked for years on this problem. Years. One feels things one wishes one didn’t. Possessiveness. Defensiveness. But one tries to put things in perspective.”
“It does bother you, then.”
She smiled her odd radiant smile. Her glasses glittered.
“Yes,” she said.
Halfway home, I remembered the lab I’d been scheduled to teach that afternoon. I’d forgotten completely about it. If I’d thought of it sooner, I might have called Rocky. She’d have found a grad student to supervise. I pressed down on the accelerator. Oddly, I didn’t feel bad at all. I felt absolutely nothing but the desire to pick Ollie up at school, give her a kiss, take her home, and get dinner, build a brave little fire in the fireplace, make hot chocolate, put her to bed in her flannel nightgown with the blue dancing stars, take out my yellow legal pads, my leaky pens, sit down in front of the fire, and go to work. Writing my own versions of bedtime stories—fantastic worlds, reached by leaps of faith, then returned from: hand over hand, across the reversed bridge of proof.
“Jesus, what’s up with you anyway, Prof?”
I’d come slogging in to school, late for my ten A.M. Organic class as it turned out. I’d given a disconnected, blurry lecture—and now, opening the lab door, I saw Rocky standing before me like a Judgment Day angel.
I dropped my briefcase and an armful of papers on a counter and walked over and took her hand and shook it.
“Congratulate me. I’m that close to chiral recognition.”
She dropped my hand. “Too bad you weren’t that close for class recognition at your lab yesterday. People were not happy, man. Especially that asshole, Donald Brandeman. I stood up and made up some lies for you—but you promised those test scores yesterday.”
“Shit. That’s right. I haven�
��t even looked at those tests.”
Rocky stared at me. “What’s goin’ on?”
I hoisted myself wearily up and balanced on a counter, a faucet fixture jutting into my back. “Jay took off. He’s gone.”
Her face swerved out of its expression, unsure. It occurred to me again how young she was. I watched her trying to figure out what to say.
“For good?”
“I don’t know, but it’s been five days and he hasn’t sent flowers.”
She didn’t laugh. The enormous distance I felt from everything focused itself now, here, on the distance between us. I felt as if I was waking up from an odd and very exhausting dream. Here was this girl, this kid—what had I been doing, trying to teach her science, lab procedure? Why was I wasting precious research time here in my own funded space, explaining things, correcting her errors, taking her painstakingly through procedures? She’s no good to me I thought, then I stopped myself. I looked just beyond her and noticed what she’d been doing. She’d set up the lab for sequencing, she had the spinners going, she had a couple of radiographs ready to pop out. The room hummed. Totally in control, I thought. How had this happened? How had this distracted, Walkman-wired, sweet-faced delinquent turned into a practicing scientist in less than two months?
She laughed, right on cue, as if she had a wiretap on my synapses.
“You taught me all this, Prof,” she said. “Remember?”
At night, Ollie and I sit in front of the fire. The heat and light attract us—we eat our meals and do paperwork before it. Ollie, sprawled on her stomach, with a sheet of white construction paper in front of her, draws wings on our house.
“It can go up,” she tells me.
“Where does it go, Ollie, when it goes up?”
She stares for a long time at the crayoned shapes, biting her lips.
Saving St. Germ Page 15
