Rosalind Franklin

by Brenda Maddox

  Back in Haifa, relating her experiences to Irene, Rosalind told about her near-rape. Her cousin privately thought, with the sarcasm of a relative, ‘Ros wouldn’t know what being raped was.’

  Irene knew Rosalind well enough to ask her directly what no one else dared: why had she never married? Rosalind gave a straight answer: all the men she had ever liked were always already married. Irene silently reasoned that Rosalind was not the type for breaking up a marriage.

  None of the awkward moments was relayed to her mother, for whom Rosalind summed up the holiday, in her last air letter on 9 September: as ‘wonderful . . . amazing, varied’. Back at Birkbeck, over cucumber sandwiches, she gave a talk to the Fabian Society at which she described her trip to Israel, particularly the kibbutzim and the research she had seen at the Weizmann Institute. Bernal was so impressed that he took steps to have a visa for Israel put in his passport, while Wolfie Traub, a member of the Birkbeck crystallography group, was so intrigued that he joined the Weizmann Institute a few years later and spent most of his scientific career in Israel.

  Her intended work on the tobacco mosaic virus was still being held up. Bernal, trying to lessen the delay, asked Randall if they might borrow from King’s ‘one of the cameras designed by Miss Franklin for the study of X-ray diffraction by solution’. Randall’s reply was true to form: ‘We do in fact intend to use this equipment very shortly and I shall have to make careful enquiries before I can give a definite answer one way or the other . . .’

  At last, by December, Rosalind had redirected, without apparent regret, her scientific curiosity and ingenuity to the tobacco mosaic virus, known from the curling, brittleness and mottled patches of light and dark green (hence ‘mosaic’) that it causes on tobacco leaves. To Rosalind TMV was just as exciting as DNA.

  Viruses are large particles made up of inert large molecules composed of proteins and either RNA or DNA. They come to life when they enter a living cell and parasitically take over the reproductive mechanism of the cell and duplicate themselves rapidly, with consequences well-known as ‘getting a virus’.

  Research on TMV was not motivated by a desire to assist the then-respected tobacco industry, but rather by a wish to understand the way it infects — injecting itself like a syringe into the host cell. TMV virtually launched the science of virology in 1886; it was simple, stable, available and highly infectious — a model for the study of viruses in general. Before the war Bernal at Cambridge, with his colleague Fankuchen, had put TMV under X-ray diffraction analysis. Together — known as ‘Sage’ and ‘Fan’ — they produced a classic paper in 1941, showing that the virus was composed of identical subunits of protein; how these fit together was anybody’s guess. Watson got the answer in 1952 by photographing a tilted sample held before the X-ray camera. This exercise was very far from his expertise, yet he succeeded in establishing that the matching subunits spiralled round in a helix. This accomplished, Watson gave up the work, concluding that ‘the way to DNA was not through TMV’. For Rosalind, on the other hand, TMV was the way out of DNA. Rosalind built on Watson’s work, correcting it with the help of her X-ray photographs, better ones than, as with DNA, anyone had got before.

  What TMV (tobacco mosaic virus) does to tobacco leaves.

  In her attic office, with her North American Phillips camera five floors below in the leaking basement, she set out to determine the internal structure of the helical array, using the techniques in which she was singularly adept. She wrote to Dr A. Lindo Patterson in Pennsylvania to tell him, what others in the field already knew, that TMV was going to be harder to solve than DNA: ‘Here the fibre-diagram is considerably more complicated than that of DNA, but judging by previous work (I’ve only just taken it up myself) it is not possible to index the reflections . . .’

  The questions to answer were: did the nucleic acid, the RNA, stand in the centre, like the wick in a candle? Or was it tucked into cosy corners between the subunits?

  The momentous year of 1953 ended with a healing visit to Nannie at Church Stretton and to the Luzzatis in Strasbourg. Denise and Vittorio, after a year at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, had returned to France, both for posts at the Centre des Recherches sur les Macromolecules in Strasbourg. Rosalind summed up the year in a Christmas letter to Anne and David Sayre in Philadelphia:

  For myself, Birkbeck is an improvement on King’s, as it couldn’t fail to be. But the disadvantages of Bernal’s group are obvious — a lot of narrow-mindedness, and obstruction directed especially at those who are not Party members. It’s been very slow starting up there, but I still think it might work out all right in the end. I’m starting X-ray work on viruses (the old TMV to begin with) and I’m also to have somebody paid by the Coal Board to work under me on coal problems — more or less the continuation of what I was doing in Paris. But so far I’ve failed to find a suitable person for the job . . .

  Really the only interesting thing that’s happened as far as I’m concerned was a wonderful summer holiday in Israel this year.

  It was just as well that Rosalind was out of earshot of King’s annual Christmas entertainment, in which a big theme was not that King’s had been outwitted by the Cavendish but that Rosalind had gone. In the programme’s ‘advertisements’ there was one for ‘Rosy’s Parlour’:

  Best crystalline NUCLEIC ACIDS:

  Dehydrated, Uviated, de-Rosieated

  (Frustrated Export), Infraredded, X-rayed

  And otherwise Maltreated

  Also: Hands Read, Bumps Told, Patterson Diagrams of your Future (and Past)

  by Request

  MADAME RAYMONDE FRANKLINE

  Clairvoyante

  But King’s was far from Rosalind’s mind. She had had an exciting year, quite apart from going to Israel and helping to discover the double helix of DNA. The next one looked like being even better. She had just received her first invitation to visit the United States.

  FIFTEEN

  O My America

  (1954)

  CARBON BROUGHT ROSALIND to the United States. With no hint of interest in her work on DNA, in 1954 the Gordon Research Conferences, an annual summer series on scientific research held in the green hills of New Hampshire by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, invited her to attend its August session on ‘Coals and Related Substances’.

  If she could raise the money, that is. The Gordon organisers could not cover travel expenses for foreign visitors ‘except for the cost of getting from the port of entry to New Hampshire and back’. Nor did the Bank of England lightly permit the export of sterling. For the would-be visitor from Britain the challenge was to find sponsors to pick up the bill, and Rosalind wanted to see a lot more than New Hampshire. An essential stop would be the new Virus Laboratory, headed by the Nobel laureate Wendell Stanley, at the University of California at Berkeley.

  The Gordon organisers did try to help Rosalind find the money. They told Rosalind they could guarantee her about $700 if, in addition to attending the coal conference, she were willing to give lectures at Pennsylvania State University and at laboratories in Pittsburgh and Cleveland. For its part, Britain’s National Coal Board wrung permission from the Bank of England to provide Rosalind with £250 on the condition that any unexpended balance be refunded on her return. As she began scraping together other contributions to pay her way to the West Coast, Rosalind was much helped by Watson and Crick. In April Crick, working for a year at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, sent her encouraging news (she was now ‘Dear Rosalind’):

  Jim and I talked to [Wendell] Stanley. He seemed interested (about T.M.V.) and suggested he could pay part of your expenses.

  I was very pleased to hear about your T.M.V. photos. Jim is certainly not doing any further work on T.M.V. but is concentrating on R.N.A. His old idea for T.M.V. was a helical arrangement of globular molecules (more or less) and as far as I know he has not developed this further.

  Yours ever,

  Francis.

  Rosalind duly wrote b
egging letters to Wendell Stanley and also to Linus Pauling:

  Since leaving the work on D.N.A. in King’s College I have been working here on tobacco mosaic virus . . . As you know, the dollar exchange position makes it impossible to obtain funds over here for such a journey, and I wondered if it would be possible for me to give a lecture or so in return for a fee which would cover a part of my expenses. Arrangements so far take me as far as Cleveland (Ohio) first week in September.

  Pauling replied that, while two weeks before the new term began was not a good time for a lecture, they would make an exception for her. He offered an honorarium of $50, plus covering the costs of her stay at the Athenaeum — Caltech’s faculty club.

  Writing to a physicist at Yale who was interested in X-ray diffraction work on DNA, she allowed herself a more detailed explanation of what exactly she was doing. Sending reprints of her two Nature DNA papers, she said she had begun:

  some similar work on tobacco mosaic virus. I have got X-ray fibre-diagrams with more than 300 sharp maxima and hope to have a cylindrical Patterson function calculated before the summer. I think there is considerable support for J.D. Watson’s suggestion that the rod-shaped particle is a single helical molecule; and if this is the case, then the cylindrical Patterson is a particularly powerful method of investigating it and there is a good chance of its showing up some of the main structural features.

  The American adventure started badly when she was refused a visa. In February the consul at the US Embassy in London turned down her application in the belief that she was going for the purpose of earning money: ‘There is considerable objection to granting a visa to anyone coming to the United States to be gainfully employed in competition with American labor.’ Four months of correspondence with the US Bureau of Mines and with the National Carbon Research Laboratories in Cleveland were necessary before the visa was granted on the understanding that Rosalind would give back any funds in excess of her expenses. The Cleveland scientist in charge of her arrangements apologised for ‘the unfortunate atmosphere which prevails in Washington’ which he saw as having clouded her application.

  Naturally, Bernal approved of her trip. The United States, the world centre of scientific research, was closed to him, a banned person, not least because his own travels that year were taking him to interview Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung. Any suspicion that Rosalind herself was seriously left-wing is dispelled by her lack of an FBI file. The Bureau’s file on Bernal is encyclopaedic.

  Rosalind was having money troubles at home too. Her Turner and Newall Fellowship was to run out in December, and what then? In mid-1954 Birkbeck asked the Agricultural Research Council to give her a three-year contract for plant virus research and for assembling a team of assistants. The appropriate salary, said Birkbeck, would be £1,100 a year, but the ARC reduced the salary, with no explanation, to £1,080. The cut was small but hurtful. It was the beginning of a difficult relationship.

  Rosalind was up against an administrative wall. Academic staff had tenure and job titles. Researchers such as Rosalind, largely supported by outside financing, were ‘external staff ‘, with lower status. Rosalind had no formal teaching duties, although as director of a research group she did a great deal of teaching in an unobtrusive form.

  How unobtrusive this could be — and an example of her extraordinary dexterity — was discovered by a Birkbeck student taking a crystallography practical examination in the early summer of 1954. ‘One would see from time to time a serious dark-haired lady but one did not know whether she was a student, a technician, or a member of staff as she had no link with the course.’ On the evening of Martyn Pease’s practical exam, she was the invigilator, looking, he thought, bored and scornful of their efforts. Each student had one hour to take an oscillation X-ray photograph, which required positioning a needle-shaped crystal onto a strand of fibre glass, sticking it down with glycerine, and then setting it upright in the dead centre of the camera. Pease was next to last. ‘The pitfalls were many,’ he recalled ‘and I fell in every one.’

  The crystal I chose was too big and its weight caused it to slide down the fibre slippery with the glycerine. Time passed rapidly and it was ferociously hot. I was verging on panic. Eventually fibre and crystal were on the camera stage and I attempted to get the needle vertical and on the axis of rotation of the stage. Much as I fumbled with the adjusting screws it wasn’t coming right. Rosalind was leaning against the wall nearby. I turned and said quietly, ‘Is this straight?’ She looked through the eyepiece and wordlessly turned the knobs once each slowly in the correct direction. It was a matter of seconds. It was only as she stepped back that she realised she had committed a misdemeanour and stalked off in a cold fury. I pressed the start button and developed the film when the oscillations ceased. I won’t say that it was fit for the textbooks but the examiners would clearly pass it on the nod.

  Rosalind made warm-up trips in May to Zagreb, where she gave a lecture on ‘Some aspects of the ultra-fine structure of coals and cokes’ organised by the Croatian Chemical Society and Croatian Physical Society; she also went to the Julian Alps where she climbed to the top of Triglav (a 2,896-metre peak). In June she went to Paris for the Third International Congress of Crystallography, where she gave three papers, one with Mering. She enjoyed also introducing some of her new scientific friends from Yugoslavia to French and British colleagues, taking them to cafés on the Left Bank and organising a picnic at Fontainebleau. Then Rosalind was ready for America. With the exception of the visit to Israel, all her travels so far had been within Europe and she had never expressed interest in going to the United States. Like many British socialists, she distrusted America’s prosperity, materialism and Cold War politics, and she disliked what she knew of loud-voiced Americans from the GIs during the war and tourists in London and Paris. For an intrepid traveller, however, the prospect of a 3,000-mile journey was exhilarating.

  In !954 the United States seemed very far from Europe. Transatlantic flights from London stopped at Prestwick, Reykjavik, Gander and Nova Scotia. As the first in her family to visit the United States, Rosalind sent home full reports, which were essentially travel diaries. She began on the plane:

  Stopped one hour for refuelling in Iceland — dull and populated by the American Air Force. To my great regret I missed seeing Greenland and icebergs, through trying to sleep. Lunch on plane. Stopped again at Gander! here the second lunch was called dinner. The reaction of all airlines to delays seems to be to produce food at frequent intervals on the assumption that this will more than compensate passengers for the time lost. Real sleeping facilities at stopping points would be far more appreciated.

  Gander was pleasant and sunny, and we were quite sorry to be pushed back into the plane. Newfoundland, from above, is most weird — apparently uninhabited, a mixture of scrubby grass rock and water (in all shapes and sizes from puddles to large lakes). As you approached the sea, the density of ponds and lakes increases, till gradually water predominates and the sea takes over.

  Arriving in Boston eleven hours late, Rosalind lost a day’s planned sightseeing. She had time to register only a brief first impression: ‘the architecture is quite as ugly as London’s but the streets are so much wider that the general effect is almost ‘‘continental’’. And it is certainly warmer.’

  In New Hampton, New Hampshire, the New World began to make itself felt. The conference lectures were held in the morning and evening, leaving the afternoon free for outdoor pursuits. She had never thought, as she wrote Colin and Charlotte, ‘of America as having trees, hills, clouds and sky more or less like Europe’. She laughed at her mother’s worry that she was ‘alone in America’. Far from that, she said, she was ‘living with about 100 people in a school in a remote and green part of the country’.

  The overwhelming impression so far is of overabundance of everything and the resulting complete self-confidence of individuals . . . Superficially they have everything and too much of it. This part of the country consists of high hills a
nd forest, the district being depopulated because it’s not enough to support the American standard of living . . .

  Meals are enormous, and consist mainly of protein and ice. I’m beginning to understand why they serve sweet pickles, maple sauce, raw onion, cranberry jelly, stuffed olives etc. with all main dishes. It’s because at some stage there is a process for extracting all the taste from the main dish . . . But the general effect, with added spices, is quite pleasant.

  Her prejudices about American accents remained: ‘I was puzzled by someone talking about the crocodiles she’d eaten, then discovered she’d said ‘‘hot dogs.’’ ‘

  The Gordon Conference was on her old subject, coal, and the assembly more industrial than intellectual. Not until she got back to Boston did she enter the scientific mainstream. Her first laboratory visit was to MIT, which, she explained to her parents, meant Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was ‘actually a University with about 10,000 students’. There she met Alexander Rich, a specialist in nucleic acids who had done work on photographing TMV, and was in transition from Caltech to the National Institutes of Health in Washington. He offered to drive her to her next stop, the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole.

  Before leaving, Alex Rich and his wife Jane arranged for Rosalind to stay overnight at the home of Jane’s mother in Cambridge near Harvard Square. Mrs King, from an old Cambridge family which had sent seven generations to Harvard, did not meet her English guest the night she arrived. In the morning, however, she cooked and served Rosalind a full breakfast. On leaving the house, Rosalind quietly asked Jane if she should tip the maid.