Rosalind Franklin

by Brenda Maddox

  Rosalind was, and remained, a curious blend of compliance and self-reliance. Her parents did not dream of trying to choose her friends or to stop her travelling freely on hazardous journeys. On the other hand, they expected her when at home to perform her filial duties, and she did, even when these included sitting impatiently with them through a very long carol concert at the Albert Hall.

  By the spring of 1945 ending the war was just a matter of time. Adrienne Weill had returned to Paris after the Liberation in 1944, there. Her daughter who remained for a time in London was entertained at the Franklins’ and quite impressed by the way they lived, especially by the British breakfast spread on the sideboard. In January 1945 Ellis Franklin received the Order of the British Empire for his work at the Home Office Ministry of Home Security, and resumed full-time work at Keyser’s bank and at the Working Men’s College. With some help from his brother-in-law Norman Bentwich, he set about reorganising the St Petersburgh Place synagogue, hoping to convince younger Jews that they could be Jewish as well as English, but also to counteract the activities of ‘alien Jews who have captured some of the organisations here, and are running them for purely Zionist motives’. He was extremely upset all the while at the general scepticism in London about reports emerging about massacres of the Jews in eastern Europe. (As Rosalind was living at home, there is no correspondence to reflect her own opinions but one assumes that on the British denial of the existence of the extermination camps, she agreed with her father.)

  Rosalind, who disliked abandon in any form, disapproved of the mad and, as she saw it, premature euphoria of VE Day in May 1945. Two months later she did, however, anticipate the war’s end by going out to buy a pair of shoes at Lilley & Skinner. Finding a queue of 200 people, and long lines at two other shoe shops, she went to Harrods instead and bought some excellent chocolate peppermint creams.

  She had begun to look for a post-war job that would take her further afield than BCURA. More immediately, she had to finish her thesis on coal. Briefly she moved back to Cambridge, staying in her old college. She savoured the good weather, the freedom, the beauty of the gardens, and was tempted to return to take up the grant she had been offered to work with Norrish.

  Norrish had forgiven her, but not she him. Her parents, trying to advise her on getting along with people better, ventured that such relationships should be impersonal. It was not a job he was offering her, Rosalind retorted: ‘He’s merely expressed willingness to have me work for him for a year as an unpaid stooge.’ She would have to do whatever he told her to do ‘and he is stupid, bigoted, deceitful, ill-mannered and tyrannical’. Thus, having talked herself out of returning to Cambridge, she sent her thesis — ‘The physical chemistry of solid organic colloids with special reference to coal and related materials’ — off to the typist.

  On 26 July 1945, a general election brought the Labour Party, under Clement Attlee, to power, turning out Winston Churchill and the Conservatives with a resounding majority of 146. (In the new Parliament Viscount Samuel became Liberal Party leader in the House of Lords.) In early August Rosalind and Jenifer went to visit Nannie Griffiths at Church Stretton in Shropshire. There when the news came of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Nannie and Jenifer listened while Rosalind explained what it meant.

  The post-war world taking shape in 1945 saw the admission of the first women to the Royal Society, for nearly three centuries the citadel of Britain’s scientific elite. There were just two: Kathleen Lonsdale, a crystallographer with the Royal Institution in London, and Marjory Stephenson from Cambridge, a pioneer in the field of chemical microbiology. Forty-three years had passed since the Society threw out the nomination of the first to be proposed, Hertha Ayrton, an engineer and physicist, on the ground that as a married woman, she was not a legal person and therefore could not be a Fellow of a body governed by statute.

  In that light, 1945 might also be described as the year in which Lise Meitner did not get the Nobel prize. A Jewish refugee from Berlin living in Stockholm, she was arguably the most distinguished woman scientist of the time. In 1939 with her nephew Otto Frisch, she had set out the concept of nuclear fission, an outgrowth of her three decades of work on radioactivity done with Otto Hahn in Berlin. In 1945, the rumours preceding the annual Nobel announcement, had it that the physics prize would go to Meitner. It did not. Hahn won the chemistry prize, but there was nothing for Meitner that year, nor in any of the subsequent years when her name was put forth. Some press reports described her as Hahn’s subordinate.

  The goal reached at last — PhD Cantab., 1945 in physical chemistry — and her first scientific paper on its way to publication, but then what? The possibilities ranged from Aberdeen to Abyssinia (there was an opening for an assistant mistress to teach physical training) as Rosalind searched for the right next step. Turning to Adrienne Weill, she wrote one of her forceful, humorous letters, and summed up her hope:

  If ever you hear of anybody anxious for the services of a physical chemist who knows very little about physical chemistry but a lot about the holes in coal, please let me know.

  She did know quite a lot about holes in coal. Her first paper, titled ‘Thermal Expansion of Coals and Carbonised Coals,’ was written with her BCURA boss, D.H. Bangham and appeared in the British journal, Transactions of the Faraday Society, in 1946. At BCURA, she had developed the hypothesis of ‘molecular sieves’ — that is, that various types of coal have porous properties to a greater or lesser degree. By performing careful mathematical calculations on the porosity and carbon content of her specimen coals — also by heating, wetting, grinding, measuring and examining them under the electron microscope — she concluded that the change in physical properties comes from their gradual squeezing together. The understanding of such hard substances offered intriguing industrial applications.

  In the summer of 1946, with foreign travel possible once more, Rosalind packed her Norwegian hiking boots and, with Jean Kerslake, set off for the French Alps, stopping at Adrienne’s flat in Paris on the way. Her usual careful advance planning had elicited a warning from the manager of a hostel in the Hautes Alpes: ‘I make you notice that, in the case you would not know it, the French youth hostels are generally too uncomfortable. They can only fit very sportive persons who are free of any prejudice.’

  Rosalind Franklin, in other words. The lack of indoor plumbing and the hard floor were positive attractions, as were the other hardships they encountered on the way — shabby hotels, the rickety bridges hastily thrown up to replace those destroyed during the war, and a stomach bug. The young women took the advice of a guide, who taught them the use of ice axes and ropes, and climbed to the summit of the steep Aiguille Pers. It took them so much longer than they had planned that when they returned, they found that the modest hotel where they were then staying (and which had been a little surprised to find two English girls travelling alone) was organising a search party. Embarrassed but forgiven, Rosalind and Jean drank wine with the crowd and passed round the cigarettes they had brought from England. On returning home, Rosalind wrote to her mother, ‘I am quite sure I could wander happily in France for ever. I love the people, the country and the food.’

  Did she ever fall in love with an individual? Jean Kerslake recalled that as much time as she spent with Rosalind, that summer and over many years, they never spoke about romance or sex, nor gossip about the love life of any of their friends. ‘She did not talk about men as the rest of us did,’ said Jean, looking back, ‘and it seemed impossible to break down her reserve.’

  The possibility naturally occurred to Rosalind’s friends and some of her family that she might have been inclined towards the love of women. They all ruled it out because of too much evidence to the contrary. In London in the autumn of 1946 Jean, with another school friend Celia Martin, joined Rosalind when she showed the tourist sights of London to two French scientists who had come to London for a Royal Institution conference on carbon. To them, it was obvious, seeing Rosalind animated and chatting happily
away in French, that she was strongly attracted to the younger of the two, Jacques Mering. Seeing her unfamiliar sparkle, her friends thought it was most unfortunate that, as they gathered, Mering already had a wife and a mistress. They would have liked to see Rosalind settle down as they and their other St Paul’s friends were doing. In Jean’s opinion, ‘I think she would have liked to have a relationship with a man, but had not the remotest idea of how to cope with them or where to start.’

  What Rosalind did know how to do, at the age of twenty-six, was to speak forcefully in public. At the Royal Institution’s meeting she presented a paper, and then rose to her feet to point out the errors in someone’s measurements of X-ray powder diagrams. She was self-confident and forthright, or, in the words of the head of crystallography at Birkbeck College, Harry Carlisle, ‘abrupt and peremptory’. There was no answer to her comments, Carlisle granted. However, he observed (after getting to know her much better), ‘her characteristic of being forthright when she knew she was on firm ground sometimes gained her enemies’.

  But not among the two French visitors. Mering and his colleague, Marcel Mathieu, were crystallographers from a French government laboratory; Mathieu was a close friend of Adrienne Weill’s, and at her suggestion had looked up Rosalind when they came to London.

  Within weeks Rosalind had the offer of her dreams: a challenging job requiring the services of a physical chemist to study holes in coal in Paris. Adrienne Weill had turned out to be the fairy godmother she had seemed.

  SIX

  Woman of the Left Bank

  (1947 - 49)

  THE LABORATOIRE CENTRAL DES SERVICES CHIMIQUES DE L’ETAT, at 12 Quai Henri IV in the fourth arrondissement, downriver from Notre Dame, was the right place for a francophile with a taste for the analysis of awkward crystals. It was a government laboratory, originally under the French Ordnance Ministry (Ministere de Poudre) but with a post-war research programme aimed at industrial applications. In the ‘labo’, as the staff called it, there were fifteen chercheurs, of whom Rosalind was one, and half a dozen technicians, under the direction of Jacques Mering. They were all terribly impressed by Rosalind, Mering not least. He immediately saw that she knew what she was doing and that she was very good at delicate experimental work. His speciality was the use of X-rays to study the internal structure of crystals known as ‘disordered’ because of imperfections in the arrangement of their molecules. Rosalind, in her studies of the carbon structure at BCURA, had used physical-chemical techniques such as heating and grinding to measure the porosity of coal and carbon. Now Mering could teach her how to employ X-ray diffraction to look at the internal organisation of charcoal and clay.

  Mering (pronounced Mer-eeng - no nasal) had been trained by Marcel Mathieu, the good friend of Adrienne Weill who had been responsible for bringing Rosalind to Paris. In 1946 Mathieu, a witty, expansive, brilliant, card-carrying Communist, was working in the department of materials under the Ministry of Defence, and kept a paternal eye on Adrienne’s protégée. He had been trained in crystallography at the Royal Institution in London in the 1920s, under the elder (William Henry) Bragg.

  In applying X-ray analysis to amorphous substances, Rosalind had, at last, the satisfaction of building on what she had been doing before. Mering used highly monochromatic (single wavelength) and finely focused X-rays to take low-angle photographs, revealing bands of varying intensity rather than the sharp spots made by more ordered crystals. Disordered matter had become a French speciality, analysed by techniques then not widely used in other countries. With her skill at chemical preparation, Rosalind was soon on her way to detecting and clarifying the fundamental difference between the carbons that turned into graphite on heating and those that did not.

  Mering was ‘Monsieur’, not ‘Professeur’. A Russian-born Jew, he had come to France early in life and was working at the Labo Central when the Nazis occupied Paris. The Ordnance Ministry, in a move to protect basic research pursuits as well as the distinguished French-Jewish scientists on its staff, shifted work out of Paris. Mering thus moved to the University of Grenoble, where he set up an X-ray laboratory. At great risk to himself, Mering did not declare his Jewishness, a fact which was supposed to be stamped in his identity card, and thus lived without proper identity papers throughout the war. When he came back to Paris, without seeking further academic qualifications, he resumed his research at the Laboratoire Central. He was just one of many returning refugees, for whom the first priority was, in the words of Marianne Weill, Adrienne’s daughter, ‘knowing who was alive and who was dead’. Marianne, who had returned from England with her mother, was now at the Sorbonne, while Adrienne was a metallurgist at the French government laboratory for naval research.

  When she arrived in Paris in February 1947, Rosalind quickly became, in D.H. Lawrence’s word, ‘unEnglished’. Apart from her breakfast, that is. Resuming her practice of weekly letters home with detailed information about her well-being and finances, she recited what she ate every morning: bread (rationed), butter (black market), marmalade (English), tea (English), milk, and fruit.

  In Paris Rosalind found, by heating carbons of different origin to as high as 3000 degrees C that graphitising carbons (top) and non-graphitising carbons (bottom) formed two distinct classes. In this schematic representation, the non-graphitising carbons are distinguished by a rigid, finely porous mass. This discovery had important industrial applications.

  Adrienne had found her a room in the sixth arrondissement, in a huge flat on the top floor of a house in the rue Garancière, around the corner from the Church of St Sulpice. The owner, a widow, had made a bedroom of the library stuffed with the relics of the professor, her late husband. The rules were strict. No noise after 9.30 p.m.; use of the kitchen only after the maid had finished preparing the widow’s evening meal; use of the bathroom (that is, the room with the bathtub) once a week. Otherwise, the washing facilities were a tin basin behind a screen. But the room was spacious and the location ideal, in the heart of the Left Bank, a few picturesque streets away from St Germain des Prés where tourists hovered around the Cafés de Flore and Deux Magots hoping for a glimpse of the pair whom the New York Times called ‘France’s No 1 and No 2 Existentialists’ — Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

  Considering its restrictions, Adrienne had expected the accommodation to be temporary, but Rosalind stayed there for the next three of her four years in Paris. She felt secure, and the rent was low — the equivalent of about £3 a month, only a third of what she would have to pay elsewhere because, she recognised, ‘the owner is more anxious that I be respectable than that she should make money’. She could get to the lab in about a quarter of an hour by bus, or by making a slight detour in half an hour, walking by the river all the way. She cast a researcher’s eye on the constant haze over the Seine: ‘while London mists are yellow, Paris’s are blue’.

  Her parents were not so sure about the respectability of Rosalind’s new arrangements. Was she not lowering her standard of living? How could she live on her salary? And how important was her work? She fell easily back into her old epistolary mode:

  Of course my standard of living is lower than at home . . . Of course I appreciate conventional comforts and of course I would rather the food situation here were normal . . . but provided one does not go below certain minimum none of these things are of supreme importance to me ... I find life interesting . . . I have good friends though my circle is naturally smaller than in London but I find infinite kind ness and goodwill among the people I work with. All this is far more important than a large meat ration or more frequent baths.

  Her job was in a government research establishment, with no immediate industrial objective. Some people might call it ‘pure research’, while others could argue ‘that there is no such thing as “pure research” since all scientific advance is ultimately useful’. She was paid according to the salary scale for French government workers, with the freedom and facilities ‘to work on my own ideas — and anybody else�
��s I may be able to borrow’. Her earnings of approximately £5 a week were sufficient for her ordinary living expenses. Extras such as holidays and clothes had to come out of what money she brought with her. Besides: ‘One only feels rich or poor in relation to the people one mixes with, and as all my friends are in the same circle . . . or worse off because they have not resources in England.’

  Resources in England could not help very much. In 1945 John Maynard Keynes wrung a $4 billion loan from the US Treasury instead of the $5 billion outright gift he had expected in recompense for Britain’s brave and successful resistance to Hitler. The loan was supposed to last four years but was gone in less than two. In consequence, the newly nationalised Bank of England slapped stringent restrictions on taking sterling abroad. Any gifts and even personal possessions were subject to rigorous examination by Customs officials on both sides of the Channel. Even Rosalind’s sewing machine was held up for two months.

  For Rosalind, such restrictions merely added to the zest of her new existence. Not only was her work fascinating but the crowd at the lab were fun. Every day they crossed the river to lunch at a small restaurant, Chez Solange, overlooking the Ecole de Physique et Chimie where Pierre and Marie Curie had discovered radium. Many of the lunchtime regulars had been in the Resistance, many were communists and all were glad to be part of ‘la bande de Solange’ or ‘les gens de Chez Solange’.

  After lunch the band would move into the Physics and Chemistry School for a ritual known as ‘les Cafés de PC — coffee brewed in a laboratory flask and served in evaporating dishes while the animated conversation rolled on — in a spirit described by one of their number as ‘liberal, Cartesian laced with atheism and defence of the rights of man’: in other words, French intellectuals playing the part of French intellectuals. There was plenty to discuss and the women engaged as equals, with no fear of condescension. Paris was at the height of its post-war political ferment, looking for a ‘third way’ between the Soviet Union and the United States. To the band of camarades General de Gaulle seemed a right-wing threat. They also talked science. Rosalind would show her X-ray photographs to Mering, who would interpret them. On occasion, English crystallographers would drop in, notably J.D. Bernal, a good friend of Marcel Mathieu’s.