Rosalind Franklin

by Brenda Maddox

  The marks of the post-war world went far beyond the political. In the United States the publication of the Kinsey Report told an astonished world that sexual behaviour was more frequent and varied than allowed in conventional morality or the Hollywood Film Code. The publication in Paris of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxieme Sexe signalled that women would no longer accept the role of bystanders at life’s pageant. And Cambridge University quietly joined the trend by officially recognising women as members of the university; it bestowed degrees retroactively on women students such as Rosalind who had graduated before 1948.

  Rosalind’s stay in France was not the unalloyed bliss that some who visited her there believed. A dark moment came in the summer of 1948 when a group from ‘la bande de Solange’ went together to Corsica for a holiday. Their destination was the port of Calvi, and the Hotel di Fango, a small pension owned by Guastala, a friend of Adrienne Weill’s, and his former wife, an architect, who had built it. Requisitioned by the Germans during the war and dilapidated, the semi-ruin was open to selected friends who were prepared to rough it. There were six couples in the party and they agreed to take turns to do the cooking.

  The composition of the group might have signalled trouble, for one of the ‘couples’ was herself and her brother Colin. Colin soon realised he had been asked along because Rosalind was the only one of that group who had no partner: ‘Nor, come to that, had I. Except for Roland, we were in that way a boring frightened lot.’ Rosalind had, however, made herself a bikini (just coming into vogue) for the occasion.

  She painted a happy picture for their parents in her holiday letter home. After a hectic week in Paris when she got through a piece of work she wanted to finish, she had left ‘utterly exhausted. Now after two night journeys and two late nights dancing I’m completely refreshed — Calvi is by far the most beautiful place I’ve seen.’

  That much was true. So was her information that on the night boat to Calvi she had travelled fourth-class and slept out on the deck. She did not mention, however, and perhaps did not notice, what much amused her French companions — that she settled her sleeping bag right outside the door of the cabin being shared by Mering and Rachel Glaeser, another of the young women in the lab. Naively, Rosalind had not realised, although everybody else in the lab knew, that Mering and Rachel were having an affair. The lovers were much amused by Rosalind curling up outside their door. It reinforced their opinion that Rosalind ‘was like Queen Victoria about men’.

  If so, the sight of unmarried couples openly cohabiting brought her into the mid-twentieth century. Before long, she and Colin went off by themselves to explore the island. When they returned, Colin was joined by Roland and a young man from Oxford whom Rosalind found ‘most unpleasant to me and my friends’. The three non-scientists formed ‘a sort of in-group’ sitting at the edge of Rosalind’s circle of scientists and before long they went off to Italy. She was thus doubly isolated.

  Back in Paris Luzzati’s wife, Denise, observed that Rosalind was, in her controlled way, very upset about the liaison. Yet the whole episode had a curious consequence. Rosalind accepted Rachel as a mother figure and Mering’s permanent partner (as she would remain for the rest of his life). Rather, she transferred her hostility to Agnès Mathieu-Sicand, another pretty young woman in the lab who appeared to have caught Mering’s roving eye. With her capacity for intense antagonism, Rosalind burned with jealousy of Agnès for the rest of her time in Paris. A telling photograph of this combustible quintet, taken outside the Ecole de Physique et Chimie, shows Rosalind, stylish in a floral print with square shoulders and pearls, and Agnès, more flashily dressed, closely flanking Mering, while Michel Oberlin (who later married Agnes) and Rachel look happily unconcerned.

  Paris did bring Rosalind a new English-speaking female friend. Anne Sayre was a writer and lawyer who appeared at the lab one day to collect her husband David, an American crystallographer who had just finished a stint in Oxford. Rosalind introduced herself and asked if the couple needed help settling in to Paris. To Anne (who remained an enormous admirer), Rosalind looked ‘very crisp and very pretty’ in a cotton print in white and lilac. Anne was struck by ‘bright inquisitive eyes and a beautiful flashing smile’; also, by a shy manner and a lovely speaking voice: ‘English as she should be spoke’. The two women became good friends and Anne sensed that there were undercurrents of strong feeling at the lab. But she never pressed for specific details and none were volunteered.

  Rosalind was beginning to make an international reputation. At meetings in Nancy, Lyons and Paris, she met scientists from Britain, the United States and the Continent. Attending one conference in Paris simply as a member of the audience, she found that her BCURA work suddenly became relevant. She rose to her feet and, in her good French, summarised her findings. The chairman, noticing the respectful silence around the room, asked her to repeat her contribution in English. After that she found herself invited, like an official delegate, on a tour of Versailles and the Petit Trianon and treated to the kind of tea with sweet cakes which she loved.

  Photographs taken on these occasions show her in the white-shirt, dark-skirt combination adopted as business uniform by professional women in the era before trouser suits became acceptable for women in the workplace. Yet at Lyons in 1947, obviously enjoying herself, she lightened her look with open-toed platform sandals, an Italian-style beach bag and bare legs, combining self- confidence with fashion consciousness and femininity.

  She stepped up her efforts to return to England. The problem was to find the right job. She implored her parents, ‘I wish you wouldn’t appeal in every letter to come home for a long holiday. I can’t be in two places at once, and at the present I’m here, but not forever.’ In the spring of 1949 after two years abroad, she reiterated to her mother, that ‘it would be a bad idea to come home without a job. I might well hang around for a year and nothing could be more depressing. I took a year from the time I started to look for a job from Cura to the time I got here.’ She had thought of working at the Royal Institution in London but ruled it out when, at one of the Paris meetings, she met the man (whom she did not name) likely to supervise her research and found him ‘odious’. The only remaining possibility was Birkbeck College’s research laboratory, but thought her chances would be better of finding the sort of job she wanted in England once she had more papers to her name.

  In the autumn of 1949, she was refused the job she had applied for at Birkbeck, and, as she told her parents, ‘I can’t face the man at the Royal Institution — so I suppose I’m here for a bit longer. Anyhow my work here is going extremely well and it would be a pity to drop it at the moment. Getting a job should be easier when it is published.’

  Birkbeck now boasted Bernal on its staff, he having shifted from Cambridge after the war with the intention of using X-ray crystallography to extend physical chemistry into biology. Rosalind was not the only Birkbeck reject that year. Also turned down was a physicist, Francis Crick, who, leaving work with the Admiralty in London, wished to join Bernal. Crick was told by Bernal’s secretary, ‘Don’t you realise that people from all over the world want to come and work under the Professor?’ Instead, Crick found himself at the Strangeways Laboratory in Cambridge, and before long, at the Cavendish Laboratory, where his path and Rosalind’s would cross.

  For her twenty-ninth birthday Rosalind asked for a subscription, at £2 10s, to the new journal established with Unesco support, Acta Crystallographica. Acta Cryst, as it is called in the field, was soon so deluged with manuscripts that it increased its annual issues from six to eight. Rosalind’s interest was not only as a reader but as a contributor. Her detailed X-ray investigation of carbons and graphites yielded results that in June 1949 were sent off to Acta Cryst. What would be her ninth published paper, ‘The Interpretation of Diffuse X-ray Diagrams of Carbon’, was written under her name alone. Mering, for reasons best known to himself but possibly related to her determination to return to England — he did not like apostates and was a man
who bore grudges — withheld his name from what was in many ways their joint work. Luzzati saw her close to tears in disappointment.

  Even so, she was gaining confidence and independence. That summer her work was going so well that she drafted a letter (the ‘letter’ was the accepted format for a brief paper) to the eminent British scientific journal, Nature. She sent a copy as well to Professor Charles Coulson of King’s College London, a theoretical physicist whose paper was cited and whom she knew from her BCURA days. Coulson found her conclusions in ‘On the Influence of Bonding Electrons on the Scattering of X-rays by Carbon’ to be ‘entirely reasonable’. He made some helpful comments, and regretted that he would be away in late June when she was coming to London but hoped to see her again. The Nature letter was accepted, after she made some modifications suggested by referees, and was scheduled for publication in January 1950. She was now in the big league of working scientists.

  The harder she worked, the harder she walked. Holidays became more important than ever to her (if that were possible) and she planned these with the meticulousness of her lab work. Through a friend at Unesco, she enlisted a young Australian woman as a companion on a walking tour in the Italian Alps in the summer of !949. Margaret Nance, a scientist recently arrived from Australia to do a PhD at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine in London, was eager to enjoy any chance to explore any part of Europe and accepted the loan of the ice axe Rosalind borrowed for her. They climbed, with a guide, the peaks above Aosta. ‘Rosalind certainly planned it all and I did what I was told,’ said Margaret.

  Rosalind’s planning extended to her own clothes. Her kit included not only a tailored anorak and hiking boots, but a stylish patterned jersey turban of the kind popularised by Coco Chanel, which she wrapped around her head to protect her ears.

  Holidays with her brothers were now finished. David Franklin had married in 1947. In 1948 Roland, at twenty-two, married Nina Stoutsker, the daughter of a cantor at the Central Synagogue, London. In 1949 Colin became engaged to Charlotte Hanjal-Konyi, whom he had met at Oxford (and whose family also claimed descent from the great Rabbi of Prague) and they married in 1950. Nannie Griffiths came for every wedding. There is no hint that any relative or guest at these ceremonies was tempted to ask the eligible unmarried elder sister when they might expect to go to hers.

  All three sons had by now married within the faith, as would Jenifer in time. Colin, looking back, said, ‘My father would never have countenanced any of his five kids marrying a non-Jew.’ However, others who knew Rosalind well are adamant that had she found the right man, his religion would not have mattered to her nor would have her father’s opposition. But somehow she did not.

  Colin had gone up to St John’s College after the war. When he took his degree, having absolutely no taste for banking, he accepted the paternal nudge into Routledge’s, the family publishing firm.

  With Colin leaving the nest, Ellis and Muriel Franklin decided it was time to leave 5 Pembridge Place for a smaller house in north London. Rosalind’s own long-term plans, she wrote Colin, asking what he wanted for a wedding present, were as vague as ever. All that was certain was that, as her Paris work continued satisfactorily, ‘I shan’t come home until I have a job.’

  SEVEN

  Seine v. Strand

  (1950)

  EARLY IN 1950 Rosalind began reading the job advertisements in Nature and, more specifically, asked Professor Charles Coulson at King’s College London how to apply for one of the Imperial Chemical Industries research fellowships available at a number of British universities. Coulson explained that the procedure was to find an appropriate department and get the consent of the departmental head before applying. He steered her in the direction of King’s College London, where in 1947, reluctantly surrendering the comforts of Oxford, he had become professor of theoretical chemistry with the possibility of venturing into biology. ‘If you are interested in possible biological applications of the technique that you now know so well,’ Coulson wrote her in February, ‘there could be quite a lot to be said in favour of King’s.’

  Rosalind did not know biology; she had not taken even gardening-level botany at St Paul’s but she was willing to learn: ‘I am, of course, most ignorant about all things biological,’ she replied, ‘but I imagine most X-ray people start that way.’

  Far from preparing to leave Paris, however, after three years in the widow’s garret, she organised a proper flat of her own. Rented accommodation was almost non-existent, as housing controls gave priority to French citizens, who then acquired security of tenure. Rosalind, however, succeeded in finding a furnished flat owned by a French commandant stationed in Germany, who was willing to let to foreign locataires because he would not risk losing control of his property. The apartment was a set of balconied rooms just under the mansard roof at 16 Avenue de la Motte-Picquet in the seventh arrondissement, near the Ecole Militaire. To share the cost, she found flatmates: an American couple, Philip and Marion Hemily. He was an American Fulbright scholar working under Vittorio Luzzati for a University of Paris doctorate in molecular structure determination by X-ray diffraction analysis. His wife Marion, with a bachelor’s degree in physics, was in the American government’s Paris office for implementing the Marshall Plan. Although the new apartment was further from the lab, it offered independence, with no great comfort, at a more elegant address.

  The place was crammed with dusty Louis XV furniture; the heating came from a coal-fired boiler in the kitchen. Philip, an American war veteran charmed by his new life, was impressed by Rosalind’ s knowledge of Parisian ways, such as ordering coal from the local café and having it delivered to the basement of their address. Every day Philip carried the bags of ‘boulettes’ up the six flights of stairs.

  Rosalind found herself in a triangle, this time a tense one. She did not get along with Marion Hemily. The living arrangements — two women and one tiny kitchen, with Rosalind’s bedroom next to the shared salon — almost guaranteed friction. Rosalind, moreover, disapproved of the Hemilys’ habit of sleeping late. She got along far better with Philip. She enjoyed cycling with him, especially if Marion did not come along, into the countryside at weekends.

  At the Labo Central, Rosalind was responsible for overseeing a small group studying the X-ray diffraction of carbons. Papers poured out. Her work began to gain wide notice because of the great industrial potential of the kind of carbon, known as ‘glassy’ or ‘vitreous’, that did not form graphite upon heating. Bell Telephone Laboratories, among others, were interested in the hard carbons that could be made into crucibles, tubes and other articles requiring reliable heat resistance.

  Her debut in Acta Crystallographica was made in June, the paper sent the previous year and her most important so far: twelve pages, with nine diagrams and many mathematical proofs, summarising one of her main findings: that some carbons cannot be transformed into graphite no matter how much you heat them.

  At the end of the paper, in the list of acknowledgements which were eagerly scanned by readers, she thanked Marcel Mathieu and J. Desmaroux, head of the Labo Central, for providing facilities, and, in conclusion, ‘Monsieur J. Mering, for his guidance and very generous help throughout the work.’

  In March 1950, with work pressing at the lab, she treated herself to a flying visit to London to look up Coulson at King’s College. He introduced her to the head of King’s physics and biophysics, Professor J.T. Randall. With Randall’s endorsement, she put in an application for an ICI fellowship, telling her parents, ‘half of me hoping I don’t get it’. It was not a particularly distinguished award, nor did it lead in any specific direction.

  Back in Paris, she went off with the Luzzatis to Italy. Her holidays, in which so much hope was invested, rarely disappointed her. This one, she proclaimed once more, was ‘the best I ever took’. She loved lying around for three hours in the middle of the day and found the countryside around Florence so beautiful they abandoned the idea of going to Rome. (As she became closer to the Luz
zatis, Rosalind drew back from Rachel Glaeser and Jacques Mering. Denise Luzzati could see the depth of Rosalind’s feeling for Mering and felt there was a hopelessness about it which Rosalind accepted.)

  Rosalind was interviewed in London by the ICI and Turner and Newall Research Fellowships Committee early in June 1950, and by mid-month she had a fellowship for three years, starting in the autumn, to work at King’s College under J.T. Randall. There she would work, according to the Fellowships secretary, ‘by means of X-ray diffraction, on proteins in solution and the changes in structure which accompany the denaturing [heating or dehydrating] proteins in solution’.

  Flattered and disappointed — ‘I’d really like I more year here’ — she applied for a postponement to the beginning of the next year, 1951, which was granted. She then was off with the Luzzatis to Normandy.

  In mid-June Randall reported her appointment to the principal of King’s College, saying that the Turner and Newall Committee had placed her ‘pretty well top of the list’ and that her work in applying X-ray diffraction to the structure of various microcrystalline carbons was well known to Coulson and himself. The money was more than decent for the times: £750 a year for three years. (In 1950 junior lecturers at British universities were paid about £400 a year.) Rosalind was not pleased, however, when her cousin Ursula’s husband, Noel Richley, a journalist with Reuters, informed her that Turner and Newall was a large North Country manufacturer of cement and asbestos. She had long prided herself on staying aloof from industry.