Rosalind Franklin

by Brenda Maddox

  Returning to Birkbeck, Rosalind watched with wry amusement the consternation of the college’s many Communists at the Soviet Union’s brutal action. ‘Reactions in Birkbeck to Hungarian things were quite interesting,’ she wrote Anne Sayre; ‘nearly all the Party members were quite shaken, though I don’t know any who left the Party.’ Bernal, she observed, was fairly rattled, and on the rare occasions she heard him refer to the event, he got ‘emotional and confused’, but soon ‘was again talking in the old Party cliches’.

  As she had planned, she bought a car — a two-door grey Austin. For her colleagues, this was another quiet sign of the income gap between her and the rest. If they owned a car at all, and very few did, they had old models whose parts they were constantly tinkering with in the Birkbeck workshop. Rosalind’s car was new.

  In 1956 cancer was not a word freely uttered. Obituaries spoke delicately of people dying ‘after a long illness’. Rosalind’s team did not know what had been wrong with her, simply that she seemed restored to health. From Harvard, Jim Watson wrote Aaron Klug, ‘I have heard rumours that Rosalind was not well. I hope she recovers soon,’ and asked him to give her his wishes for a speedy return to health.

  Her colleagues were glad to have her back. They were working on the comparison of plant viruses, with the amicable cooperation of Maurice Wilkins. Wilkins penned a note to ‘those in charge of cold rooms & fridges’ at King’s College: ‘Please give Dr Klug every assistance so that he may search for a bottle of TYMV [turnip yellow mosaic virus] which we wish him to have.’

  With her formidable control over intrusive emotion, Rosalind’s main concern was the future financing of her research group. She had developed a well-knit and loyal team but time was running out on their support. Sir William Slater had let it be known that funds from the Agricultural Research Council were unlikely to continue beyond the end of April 1957. There was no more in sight from any other British source. A month back at work, Rosalind submitted a clear, well-thought-out application to the Public Health Service of the US National Institutes of Health. Formally explaining her reasons for seeking help from abroad, she spelled out that her British grant had been decreased, that the collaboration between herself and Dr Aaron Klug was proving fruitful, and that the well-balanced research team they had built up should be allowed to continue for at least five years. Their project, moreover, was unusually international in character.

  Under ‘Significance of this research’, she summarised three years’ investigation into the combination of ribonucleic acid (RNA) and protein:

  Recent work has shown that there is a close similarity between the small RNA-containing viruses such as poliomyelitis and the ‘spherical’ plant viruses with which our work is largely concerned. Moreover preliminary work on cytoplasmic nucleoprotein particles from various sources indicates some degree of structural resemblance between these and the small viruses.

  The information into the internal structure of viruses gained by X-ray diffraction studies, she emphasised, could not be obtained by any other available technique. Accordingly, she requested $28,345 for the year beginning 1 October 1957 — roughly £10,000.

  Illness pushed to the back of her mind, anxious about the unsettled future of her research group, she ended a difficult year with a trip to Paris, then to Strasbourg to see the Luzzatis, now the parents of two small children. Rosalind was amused to watch the children watching her: ‘The thing that impressed Anne (the eldest) most about me was that I ate an egg for breakfast — she was convinced that I’d made a mistake about the time of day.’ During the visit, which included a walk in the Black Forest, Rosalind never spoke of the nature of her illness. She was back in the lab by 9 January.

  Ever her booster, Bernal wrote to the ARC’s chairman, Lord Rothschild, pointing out the great progress Rosalind’s group had made:

  The results which are beginning to show the precise relation of nucleic acid to the protein component are just now at the very centre of interest of biological structure analysis and are already beginning to tie up with the structure of such components as microsomes and chromosomes.

  Rothschild, replied to ‘Dear Sage’, signing himself ‘Victor’, that arrangements would be made for Miss Franklin which he hoped would be satisfactory.

  For the few months of 1957, Rosalind regretted that she had energy for working half-days only. Even so, she went into to the lab every day, preparing her specimens, drying her gels, turning them into crystals for the X-ray camera, comparing the evidence from different varieties. The papers poured out. She had published seven in 1956; six were on their way in 1957, mainly about viruses and co-authored with her colleagues, Aaron Klug, Ken Holmes and John Finch. An exception, which appeared in Nature, concerned oxidation in carbon and was written with her doctoral student, James Watt. An important long article on the turnip yellow mosaic virus, signed by Franklin, Klug and Finch, had been intended for Nature, but, at Crick’s suggestion, sent instead to Biochimica et Biophysica Acta. ‘I feel in the long run,’ Crick said, ‘it does people more harm than good to publish too much in Nature.’ (A condensed version of the paper was sent to Nature anyway.)

  At intervals, Rosalind went back to University College Hospital for a checkup. On 20 February, a follow-up examination reported that she was feeling well generally, although hot flushes through the night prevented her sleeping. Confidently Klug wrote to a biochemist in Kansas, ‘Rosalind Franklin is well again and back in the laboratory.’ From what Klug could see, ‘She looked okay.’

  Nothing had been heard from the US Public Health Service when, in mid-April, the Agricultural Research Council (true to Rothschild’s word) renewed its grant — but for only one more year. This was to be the final — underlined final — year: £4,300, to end in March 1958. After that, the ARC hoped that American sources would provide support. In a frosty coda, the council’s governing committee observed that it was ‘inappropriate’ for a worker of Miss Franklin’s seniority to be carried on an annual grant. They were concerned at the absence of any steps, apart from the application for American funds, to establish the research on a more permanent basis. Miss Franklin, they felt, should either seek a post in a university or a research institute. They understood that she was not willing to do so.

  Or able. The illusion of normalcy was shattered at the end of April when Rosalind was readmitted for two days to University College Hospital, very distressed, with profuse bleeding from the rectum. Two weeks later she was back in hospital, complaining of abdominal pain. An examination revealed a new mass on the left side of the pelvis. With the endless rounds of internal explorations, investigative enemas, palpating, probing and discussing, a very private woman was private no longer.

  Rosalind asked her surgeon for an honest prognosis, and he gave it — frank and discouraging. He urged her to seek the comforts of religion and be grateful that she had time to prepare her soul. She was furious — with him, for despair; with science, for not yet having discovered a way to halt the progress of her disease until a cure could be found. She chose to remain hopeful; her new treatment was to be cobalt radiotherapy. Starting in mid-May, she disappeared from the lab from time to time and returned. True to form, she never told anyone where she was going.

  Concerned with the personal futures of her young team as well as for the future of her research, she put enormous motherly effort into investigating sources of finance for them all. Cheering news came from the secretary of the Medical Research Council who thanked Sir Lawrence Bragg of the Royal Institution for letting him know how highly he thought of Miss Franklin’s work. The MRC would consider supporting two of her students when the ARC money ran out.

  New research material arrived for crystallographic analysis. The Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York sent her some rat liver nucleoprotein, frozen and stored in a thermos bottle, and carried across the Atlantic by Francis Crick. Rosalind, standing in a ‘cold room’, packed the substance into capillary tubes for X-ray photographing later. At the same tim
e, she was under pressure to build models of her tobacco mosaic and turnip yellow mosaic viruses; those planned for the Brussels World’s Fair would be five feet high. Professor J.W. Moulder of the University of Chicago’s microbiology department, who was in charge of the international science section at the fair, enthusiastically urged her to make them as large as possible for maximum visual effect. The models, he said, were to be a highlight of the general virus exhibit and had to be ready, with explanatory material understandable by the general public, by November.

  NINETEEN

  Clarity and Perfection

  (May 1957-April 1958)

  NO ONE WHO SAW ROSALIND in public in the summer season of 1957 would have guessed she was living under threat. Hiding any pain or weariness, she stood on her feet for long hours in evening dress, demonstrating and explaining her work at exhibitions. One week into cobalt therapy, she presented her models at the Royal Society’s conversazione as part of a display on the application of X-ray analysis and electron microscopy to rod and spherical plant viruses. Her parents came and found her looking lovely, gay and happy. Three weeks later, on the evening of the day of her last cobalt treatment, she put on a red silk Chinese blouse for a Friday evening discourse at the Royal Institution - a pre-Victorian ritual at which an invited black-tie audience listens to a lecture, then strolls through displays in the library. Accompanying the talk — ‘Observations on the Architecture of Viruses’ — by Robley Williams of the Virus Laboratory at Berkeley, were four exhibits: two by himself and Kenneth Smith, one by Crick and one by Franklin and Klug.

  Francis Crick continued to be a friend and uncompromising critic. ‘Rash in the extreme’ was his judgement on a Franklin—Holmes paper on the use of heavy atom substitution to determine the internal measurements of the tobacco virus. Listing his objections, Crick advised more research and warned of the dangers of publishing wrong information: ‘There is absolutely no urgency to publish a paper at the moment. Nothing is lost by postponing publication, whereas if you publish it and it turns out to be wrong your whole research programme will be discredited.’

  No urgency, of course, unless you were dying. But that is not how Rosalind saw it. She wanted to submit the paper she and Ken Holmes had written, to Acta Cryst. She took Crick’s comments to heart, as she undoubtedly did also those appended by Max Perutz whose wise observation applied to more than crystallography:

  One so easily persuades oneself of the rightness of a dubious solution and then spends one’s time in fruitless search of supporting evidence. As Francis has said, this is an occupational disease among protein crystallographers. It can be kept at bay only by frequent cold showers.

  Don Caspar reappeared in her life. He was in Cambridge, with his mother, for the summer of 1957. Rosalind had got along extremely well with the widowed Mrs Caspar when they met the previous August in Colorado and their friendship resumed when Rosalind came to visit Francis and Odile Crick. In subsequent weeks, Rosalind had Mrs Caspar to stay at her London flat; one day, for mother and son, Rosalind organised one of her favourite treats — a picnic in Richmond Park.

  As Rosalind’s health seemed to improve, so did the outlook for her virus group. On 9 July she heard from an official at the US Public Health Service in Bethesda, Maryland, giving her informal notice that her research grant had been approved by the National Advisory Allergy and Infectious Diseases Council. J. Palmer Saunders sent the news ‘preliminarily,’ he explained, ‘because of the unfortunate delay you have encountered previously’.

  However, the news was not greeted with universal rejoicing at Birkbeck. There was a feeling that the American grant, £10,000 a year for each of three years, was too much: £10,000 was enough to be spread over three years rather than be paid as an annual sum.

  Two conferences and a holiday in Europe in mid-summer: why not? Rosalind was feeling improved even though re-examination in July showed that the pelvic mass on the left side was still there and her parents asked for a second opinion. When the hospital advised that Rosalind remain near London just in case some intestinal obstruction should occur, she took the advice instead of her friend Dr Mair Livingstone, that there were doctors on the Continent should she need one. However, Rosalind was not oblivious to her condition; she told Livingstone that in the United States the previous summer she had met a man she might have loved, even married, but whom she had put out of her mind because of her illness.

  She and Caspar attended a conference on polio in Geneva, where the star was Dr Jonas Salk, discoverer of the polio vaccine in 1953. Afterwards, with Caspar, his mother and Richard Franklin (no relation — rather a friend of Caspar’s from Yale who owned a Volkswagen) she went to Zermatt. Mrs Caspar photographed the trio silhouetted against the great peak of the Matterhorn. Rosalind did not mention her illness, and seemed well, even if she did not have the strength she had had the previous summer in the Rockies. For her, the Alpine excursion in the company of a close friend was the highlight of her summer: ‘a glorious weekend in Zermatt’, as she summed it up for Anne Sayre.

  Leaving Geneva, she attended a protein conference in Paris, then embarked on a long driving tour through northern Italy, with her sister Jenifer and a friend. She would have preferred something more rugged:

  This was my first continental holiday by car, and confirmed my suspicion that cars are undesirable on holiday. Italy was wonderful, as always — the Dolomites, Verona, Ravenna, Pistoia, Lucca, a delightful day with the Luzzati family near Viareggio and the sea at Portovenere. But travelling around in a little tin box isolates one from the people and the atmosphere of the place in a way that I have never experienced before. I found myself eyeing with envy all rucksacks and tents.

  She was in no way an invalid on the trip, made in Jenifer’s Morris Minor which had been flown across the Channel in the primitive air-lift operating from Lydd on the Kent coast. And her good humour made a strong impression on Luzzati’s mother, who was convinced that any woman scientist would look and behave like a suffragette. She was surprised and pleased, he recalled, to find out how attractive and easy-going Rosalind was.

  Polio was her new interest. In mid-1957 she began to study the virus — rather, to try to. It was spherical, morphologically close to the turnip yellow mosaic virus. When two scientists at Berkeley offered to supply her with polio crystals, she wrote to ask Bernal’s permission. He, in turn, sought the Master’s: ‘In view of the extremely small amounts of infective material with which she will be dealing, and the very careful precautions she will be taking, there could be no objection to the research being carried out.’

  Bernal’s plea was thwarted, not by his usual adversary, the Master, Dr J.F. Lockwood, but by the staff. Some felt that Birkbeck was so old and filthy that if it were cleaned up it would fall down — hardly premises in which to store a dangerous material. The physicist Werner Ehrenberg was particularly alarmed, as he himself had been crippled by polio. At one point, Rosalind stored the crystals in her parents’ refrigerator. As she put them in a thermos flask, she said to her mother, ‘You’ll never guess what’s in there. Live polio virus.’

  In time, the virus was housed at the nearby London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. From the School, Professor E.T.C. Spooner commiserated with Bernal in having failed to dispel ‘the fears of some of your people; the magic word ‘‘poliomyelitis’’ has such a terrific emotional build-up at present that one cannot expect normal critical faculties to work’:

  I am myself quite sure, as I think you are, that the risk associated with Dr Franklin’s proposed work is quite negligible, smaller probably than that which anyone takes who subjects himself to any kind of injection, for instance. Of course there is a risk; as there is that a house will burn down, or that a meal in a restaurant will give you botulism; or there is the far greater risk of walking across a road. But that is not the point; and I doubt if anything I can say will alter the position. However, I do hope it will be possible for Dr Franklin to do this work. To have to confess to our American friends (
who already laugh at our timidity over the polio vaccine) that it cannot be done because of the risk that the tube might break would, in my view, be extremely humiliating.

  We in my department will gladly do anything we can to help.

  With the virus safely housed, Rosalind took it for X-raying to the Royal Institution. Klug and Finch, who were working with her, chose to take the vaccine, but Rosalind decided against it. Her decision has been interpreted as fatalistic courage; as she already had a terrible disease, she could risk another. It seems more likely, however, that Rosalind, rather than manifesting an indifference to survival, was as conscious as was Professor Spooner of the low probability of an accident. She knew that she was not going to drop or break the test tubes. Proudly she added a new title to her curriculum vitae: ‘From Oct 57 Project Director of a US Public Health Service grant for research in molecular structure of viruses by X-ray diffraction.’

  By November, the lull was over. Her stomach had swelled up again, she told Anne Piper over the telephone, and she needed to have it drained. It seems to have been at that point that she became a patient at the Royal Marsden Hospital, just around the corner from her flat in Drayton Gardens. Her admission to the Marsden, an institution specialising in cancer treatment, was the first evidence her staff had of what her illness really was. At the Marsden, she was one of the first to receive chemotherapy. Alice Franklin, her aunt who lived very near, marvelled at her courage, also her faith, each time, that the latest treatment would hold the disease in check until a cure could be found. In a rare willingness to talk about her work with her family, she offered to show her Aunt Alice some of her drawings and diagrams.