Rosalind Franklin

by Brenda Maddox

  Stokes later admitted that he and Wilkins took the ‘death’ notice more seriously than Rosalind and Gosling intended. There was a ‘memorial’ meeting of sorts — a ceremony, a bit of an academic joke — but the spots were real. Rosalind had the Pattersons spread out all over the table. She and Gosling both wanted to display their evidence that offered an alternative explanation for the A form that was not helical.

  Herbert Wilson, a doctoral student on a fellowship from the University of Wales, began working with Wilkins in the autumn of 1952, comparing DNA and nucleoprotein from the same source. He became aware of the unusual situation: Wilkins, who was responsible for initiating the DNA X-ray studies at King’s and to whom Signer had given his precious DNA samples, was now excluded from studying it. Hearing Maurice mutter about Rosalind hoarding the best DNA for herself, Wilson asked the obvious question. Why not ask for some of the Signer DNA back? Wilkins strictly forbade him to do so.

  There was no point. Rosalind was leaving on 1 January. Then Wilkins would have the Signer DNA all to himself. Wilkins continued to make regular visits to Cambridge. (Colleagues at King’s had his fondness for Odile Crick as the motive.)

  That term, disregarding Rosalind’s warning, Pauline Cowan also came to King’s. There were not a lot of jobs available and she was interested in biophysics. She thought she had been engaged to construct a model of DNA as Wilkins was quite keen on the model-building approach. But she did not go ahead because Rosalind objected. The structure would not be solved that way, she said. As Cowan saw it, ‘She was a very forceful personality, Maurice was not. So I got involved with collagen.’ Cowan also formed the impression that Randall was essentially collecting people without a clear idea of what they were doing.

  Nobody at the Cavendish in Cambridge was working on DNA. Bragg’s ban still held. What Pauling was up to at Caltech was unclear. The Cavendish, however, now had a Pauling on the premises. Peter Pauling, Linus’s younger son, was one of two fresh young American faces in Room 103. The other was Jerry Donohue, a physical chemist and former graduate student of Pauling’s.

  As a family, the Paulings were as close-knit as the Franklins, and more effusive. The parents, Linus and Ava Helen, corresponded regularly and lovingly with their second son, who had arrived in Cambridge, with a supply of colour film and a set of the International Tables for Crystallography, to live at Peterhouse, the oldest Cambridge college, to do research with John Kendrew. Their letters were usually about practical matters, such as the kind of car to buy when the elder Paulings came to Europe or whether Peter should wear woollen underwear, but there was a strong undercurrent of scientific information throughout. Peter, about to turn twenty-two, was struggling with the difficulty of entering a field in which his father was a world giant.

  ‘Have you met Crick yet?’ Linus wanted to know at the end of October. Indeed, Peter had, and liked Crick and Odile very much. They had a new baby and a picturesque small house called the Green Door in the heart of Cambridge and often invited Peter to Sunday lunch. Crick had edged into quasi-acceptance at Cambridge. The biologist Michael Swann had got him into Caius, as a member of the college, but not of the university; hence he could not wear a gown and was presumed to be a guest every time he exercised his dining rights.

  Peter Pauling also became friendly with Watson, a young American like himself in pursuit of female company. He told his parents that he thought he would take French lessons, having learned from Jim Watson about a woman who had a house ‘full of French girls’. ‘No women in this town,’ Peter explained. (So much for Newnham and Girton.) In his research, he was planning to use the new Cochran-Crick theory to determine the helical nature of protein molecules. He was also interested in the molecular structure of the myoglobin of sperm whales. ‘Stranded whales are the property of the Queen,’ Peter wrote home, ‘but we have an agreement with her to get a piece of meat if one comes ashore.’ In return, his father informed him that he and Corey had sent a paper to Nature proposing molecular structures for hair, horn and such substances, involving ‘a parallel aggregation of helices’.

  By November everybody at King’s knew that Rosalind was leaving. Gosling was shocked and saddened. He had not realised that things had got that bad. Also he would be deprived of his thesis supervisor, right in the middle of work that was proving productive and publishable. There was so much more to do. However, her date of departure for Birkbeck had been postponed from January because she had lost a month’s work with flu. She hoped to finish up the Patterson work for the two papers to Acta Cryst she was preparing on her DNA discoveries.

  Her as-yet-unpublished results were given to the members of the MRC’s biophysics committee when, on 15 December, responding to Randall’s invitation, they came for their day at King’s. Some of them, particularly their chairman, Sir Edward Salisbury, were uneasy about what ‘Randall’s Circus’ was up to.

  Like students preparing for the school’s Open Day, each of the staff wrote up his and her current work; Rosalind no exception. She included the same information that was in her Turner and Newall report at the start of the year and handed it in to Randall who had it printed in advance, on 5 December. She gave the full dimensions of the unit cell, its length, width, and angles. She claimed to have established ‘with certainty’ that the crystal fell into the space group called ‘face-centred monoclinic’. The results of a year’s incomparable research, put like a gift in a box, for the MRC committee’s holiday reading.

  The committee came to King’s at noon. First it was conducted by Randall around the new laboratories, then entertained to lunch. From two until four members were free to discuss with individual workers those parts of the research which interested them specially. Then they had tea (which had just come off the ration). The visit was judged a great success. The secretary of the MRC recorded that ‘Salisbury [Sir Edward Salisbury, the chairman] is now satisfied that Randall and his team are concentrating their energies upon important problems.’ An example mentioned was the use of the interference microscope to measure the dry weights of living cells and their components. ‘This represented an important advance in quantitative cytochemistry, and it filled a need long felt by biologists.’

  Clearly, King’s work on the structure of DNA had not made a big impression.

  The report circulated to the committee was not marked ‘Confidential’, nor was it confidential. On the other hand, in the customary British manner in which everything official is considered secret until deliberately made public, the report was not expected to reach outside eyes.

  While King’s was priding itself on having passed its MRC test, Peter Pauling in Cambridge received big news from his father. Pauling wrote that he and Corey had worked out a structure for DNA. Peter immediately showed the letter to Watson and Crick. Watson was devastated. He and Crick had long feared that Pauling might crack the problem before they did.

  Watson left Cambridge to go skiing in Zermatt with his sister over the holiday break, convinced that Pauling had triumphed. He stopped off in London to break the bad news to Maurice Wilkins. Wilkins countered with the good news that Rosalind would leave King’s as soon as she finished writing up her work and would not be taking DNA with her. He could then get down to model-building in earnest.

  End of term at King’s brought the annual Biophysics dinner, but Rosalind understandably chose not to attend. On Christmas Eve, Randall left his office and went along Fleet Street and up Ludgate Hill to St Paul’s Cathedral. He climbed the many steps only to find the building locked. Outraged, he shot off a scathing letter to the editor of The Times, giving his address as his club, the Athenaeum. The letter appeared on 30 December under the heading ‘Christmas at St Paul’s’:

  Sir — There can be few village churches throughout the land whose doors do not remain open on Christmas Eve for prayer, carols, and meditation, and in many churches Christmas Day begins with a midnight service. Why does the great Cathedral Church of St Paul, set as it is in the heart of London, fail in its duty in this reg
ard? As I approached the cathedral about 5.15 p.m. on Christmas Eve, a peal of bells died away: but instead of the doors being wide open to receive those who wished to enter they were locked and many went bewildered away under the mocking lights of a Christmas tree which denied the spirit of Christmas . . . Can not the Dean put his cathedral to better use at Christmas? No wonder the Church attracts such a small fraction of the public to within its doors at the one time of year when the Christian faith implies that they should have ever-open doors.

  A more superstitious man might have interpreted the sacred portals shut in his face as a portent.

  TWELVE

  Eureka and Goodbye

  (6 January-16 March )

  ‘Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data. For that matter, no one at King’s realised they were in our hands.’

  James Watson, The Double Helix

  THE SECRET OF LIFE, four billion years old, was unpicked in a drama that moved day by day, almost hour by hour, in the first seven weeks of 1953.

  News that Linus Pauling and Robert Corey had solved the structure of DNA started the clock running. On 6 January Rosalind, who somehow had got wind of the news, wrote Corey at Caltech and asked for details. They had been in correspondence since May when he had marvelled at her ‘splendid X-ray photographs of nucleic acid fibres’.

  Her notebooks show intense activity as January progressed. She herself had started to think of building a model of the A form based on her Patterson calculations. Might these represent a figure-eight shape - two coils crossed in the middle? Or paired rods? She knew of Chargaff’s ratios and tried to squeeze the four bases of DNA into a structure with the phosphates on the outside. They would not fit. Still bemused by the discrepancies between the A form and the B form, she accepted that the B form was a two-chain helix but still had doubts about the other. As her later collaborator Aaron Klug was to comment, ‘The stage reached by Franklin at the time is a stage recognisable to many scientific workers, when there are apparently contradictory, or discordant, observations jostling for one’s attention and one does not know which are the clues to select for solving the puzzle.’

  She had been at work for a week when Peter Pauling returned to Cambridge from his winter break in Germany and Austria. On 13 January he wrote his father to ask for a copy of the Pauling-Corey paper on DNA, adding that the Cavendish’s MRC Unit would like one too. He prefaced the request with a joke:

  You know how children are threatened ‘You had better be good or the bad ogre will come get you.’ Well, for more than a year, Francis and others have been saying to the nucleic acid people at King’s, ‘You had better work hard or Pauling will get interested in nucleic acids.’

  Pauling sent the paper, confident that he had scored another victory over Sir Lawrence Bragg, his old rival at the Cavendish. In fact, he sent two copies of ‘A Proposed Structure for the Nucleic Acids’ to England, one to Peter and the other to Bragg. Peter replied, ‘We were all excited about the nucleic acid structure. Many thanks for the paper. Second sunny day since I have been in England.’

  The paper appears to have arrived on 28 January, and there was indeed excitement at the Cavendish. When Peter brought the paper to the lab, Jim Watson had to restrain himself from grabbing it out of Peter’s hand. He held back, impatiently listening to Peter’s summary, until he yanked it out of Peter’s outside pocket and read it for himself. Instantly he saw that Pauling’s proposed structure — a triple-stranded helix with the phosphates at the centre — was much like the mistaken model that he and Francis Crick had built in November 1951. Worse — or better, from Watson’s point of view — Pauling had made a fatal chemical error. The phosphates were not ionised — that is, Pauling had not built in the electrical charges phosphates acquire when in water. What he was proposing as a structure for nucleic acid was not an acid at all.

  Pauling had made the silly mistake because he was in a hurry. But why? There has been much retrospective speculation on why one of the world’s greatest chemists, the holder of the Presidential Medal for Science, the author of the classic textbook on the nature of the chemical bond, should have risked his reputation by rushing into print with a carelessly flawed proposal. One suggestion was that Pauling, having cracked the structure of protein, wanted credit for solving the other half of the cell’s secrets. Another is that, for all his many honours, Pauling had never won the Nobel prize. Pauling later said that his wife once asked him why he hadn’t cracked the problem and that, upon reflection, his answer was: ‘I guess that I always thought that the DNA structure was mine to solve, and therefore I didn’t pursue it aggressively enough.’

  Watson’s delight in the error was tempered by the news that the Pauling paper would soon be published in February in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The mistake would immediately be spotted and Pauling would be on the trail again. Watson felt he and Crick had about six weeks’ breathing space.

  Also on 28 January Rosalind gave her leaving seminar at King’s. Maurice Wilkins thought she was long-winded; he strained to hear the word ‘helix’ and did not. Neither did Herbert Wilson, who took notes. She did not refer to the B form of DNA, nor show the superb Photo 51, but concentrated instead on the recent experimental work of herself and Gosling that suggested that the A form of the molecule was not helical.

  For J.T. Randall, an unwelcome sight at the end ofthat month was Jim Watson. The gawky young American from the Cavendish seemed always to be turning up at King’s College London. One morning Randall went in to the coffee club that met daily in Angela Brown’s room and there was Watson, grinning. ‘Here’s the Dean of St Paul’s!’ he wisecracked. Randall’s pompous Christmas letter to The Times had been the subject of general mirth in the lab.

  No one else talked to the inventor of the cavity magnetron like that. Randall was furious. Once Watson was gone, he boomed out, ‘Never let that man in my sight again!’ Out of sight, however, was not out of mind.

  Rosalind did not like the sight of Watson either. On 30 January the door to her office opened and in he came. The only published account of what ensued is his: a pivotal scene in The Double Helix:

  Since the door was already ajar, I pushed it open to see her bending over a lighted box upon which lay an X-ray photograph she was measuring. Momentarily startled by my entry, she quickly regained her composure and, looking straight at my face, let her eyes tell me that uninvited guests should have the courtesy to knock.

  Watson asked her whether she wanted a look at Pauling’s manuscript, and getting little response, rushed on to point out where Pauling had gone astray. She countered with her own evidence that a helical structure was by no means proven. But Watson had heard from Wilkins that Rosalind was ‘definitely anti-helical’ — neither of them having seen her evidence. (The Birkbeck crystallographer, Harry Carlisle, wrote in his memoirs, ‘I am convinced from Rosalind’s excellent X-ray studies on both the A and the B forms of DNA that she was not in the least ‘‘anti-helical’’ at that time as suggested by Watson in The Double Helix.’) He felt that Rosalind was more concerned with extracting positive arguments from her X-ray data.’ For his part, Watson decided that she did not know what she was talking about:

  I was more aware of her data than she realised. Several months earlier Maurice had told me the nature of her so-called anti-helical results. Since Francis had assured me that they were a red herring, I decided to risk a full explosion. Without further hesitation I implied that she was incompetent in interpreting X-ray pictures. If only she would learn some theory, she would understand how her supposed anti-helical features arose from the minor distortions needed to pack regular helices into a crystallising lattice.

  Suddenly Rosy came from behind the lab bench that separated us and began moving towards me. Fearing that in her hot anger she might strike me, I grabbed up the Pauling manuscript and hastily retreated to the open door.

  ‘Fearing that in her hot anger she might strike me’: the patent absurdity of this remark has caused m
uch scorn. Rosalind was of slim build and medium height, Watson a stringy six feet plus. But the male fear of the female has always been absurd — the stronger afraid of the weaker — but no less real for that. To dismiss it is to dismiss the Medusa, the Loathly Lady, the Wicked Witch of the West and all the other guises for whatever the male resents and recoils from in the female; that led even the mild-mannered graduate student John Cadogan to say of Rosalind, ‘She nearly terrified the living daylights out of me.’

  Watson’s own bewilderment with women is well chronicled in The Double Helix. He could not approach them unselfconsciously: they were either prey — ‘popsies’ or ‘au pairs’ — or goddesses such as his aristocratic Scottish hostess Naomi Mitchison or his sister Elizabeth. Rosalind was neither; worse, she was an angry woman. And she had reason to be angry. Courtesy might have demanded that Corey send a copy of their DNA paper to her, not to the Cavendish.

  Watson portrays Rosalind’s ‘hot anger’ as entirely unmotivated. There is another possible explanation for her rage — indeed of the whole incident. Early in 1953, very upset, she complained to a friend at King’s that she had come back to her room one day and found her notebooks being read. If Randall and Wilkins saw themselves as her bosses, she stormed to her confidant, they should have protected her work better. Instead, she knew Wilkins to be in open and frequent communication with the Cavendish pair. She voiced her fears also to an old colleague from BCURA.