Rosalind Franklin

by Brenda Maddox

  Rosalind liked her doctors at the Marsden, especially her case supervisor, the well-known Dr David Galton of the Chester Beatty Institute, part of the Institute of Cancer Research, who would sit and talk with her and in whom she had utmost confidence. With her radiotherapist too, she had good rapport, asking questions and getting intelligent answers.

  Visitors to her room in Granard House, the Marsden’s private wing, found her in a wine-coloured dressing gown, taking radioactive liquid gold in a tilting bed, with a television set in her room, and Jenifer or one of her brothers usually at her bedside. Nannie came to see her. After a week, however, she was still in pain.

  Into her room one day walked Peggy Clark, who had read science with her at Newnham. Peggy was now, under her married name of Dyche, a medical physicist on the Marsden staff. She had seen a parcel addressed to Dr Rosalind Franklin and wondered if it was her old college friend. Not having seen Rosalind since Paris, Peggy found her looking reasonably fit and cheerful. Rosalind was happy to talk; she complained about the incompetence of the doctors at University College Hospital and spoke of her hope that the chemotherapy would be successful. She described with pride her virus model to be exhibited at the Brussels World’s Fair. In subsequent days, when she got out of bed, Rosalind would occasionally wander into the hospital laboratory to chat with Peggy and other staff about the radioisotopes they were dispensing.

  In and out of hospital at the end of 1957 and the beginning of 1958, when not well enough to live by herself in her flat, Rosalind stayed with her brother Roland and his wife Nina at their home on Aylmer Road in East Finchley. She listed Roland as ‘next of kin’ on her hospital admission form. Her mother would ask, ‘Why are you going to Nina’s?’ but the rest of her family understood. Rosalind positively enjoyed staying with Roland and his wife, who had several small and lively children. Her room was ready and her bed warmed for her whenever she wanted to come; she could rest when she wished, and otherwise play with her nieces and nephews. In Roland’s view, his mother was over-solicitous and his father seemed unable to cope: ‘I think she just felt more comfortable in our house. We never discussed her illness. It’s not a confiding sort of family; we were very private and we would not share emotions or thoughts or anything with each other at all.’

  Perhaps not, but her brothers, as so often before, were emotional props. She did have her dark moods: the thought of dying with her work unfinished made her furious and depressed; she would ring Colin or Roland in the middle of the night if she needed to talk. All three brothers were named as executors when, on 2 December 1957, she made her will. None of her relations were named as beneficiaries of her modest estate — not surprising, in an affluent family whose financial affairs were well-organised. Instead, she chose Aaron Klug as her principal beneficiary, to receive £3,000, plus her Austin car. Next on her list were two close women friends who had children to support: for Dr Mair Livingstone, £2,000; for Anne Piper, £1,000. Last, ‘my old Nurse Miss Griffiths’ was to have £250. The residue of the estate was to be distributed by the executors to charities ‘of which they think I would have approved’.

  The sums involved were not small at the time to people without savings or capital. The legacy to Aaron Klug, as seen by his friend, Dan Jacobson, was a brilliant and sensitive stroke. Jacobson imagined Rosalind saying to herself, ‘What does Aaron need?’ She knew that the Klugs, with a small son, were very short of money and that he was considering going back to South Africa. Her gift was thus well in the Franklin family tradition of enlightened philanthropy.

  Still in hospital over Christmas, she laughed when some worthy ladies made knitted presents for the patients, and hers turned out to be a pullover with no hole for the head. She was not that ill, she joked. By early January 1958 she felt well enough to go on an outing with her cousin Ursula. Rosalind said she wanted some French food so Ursula drove her to a good restaurant in Richmond; she also enjoyed a walk in the park. Later she described the day out in a letter in French to Adrienne Weill, with the vividness (‘La journée de hier a été magnifique’) she had put in her holiday letters about her Alpine adventures. Indeed, she felt so well after her excursion, she said, that it seemed ridiculous to return to the hospital to play the invalid. She decided to negotiate her release, continue the treatment as an outpatient and begin making appearances at the lab. From then on, she said, she would, little by little, return to normal life.

  A few days later she did as she wished. Leaving hospital in mid-January, she signed a three-year lease on her flat and wrote in French to Luzzati (still scrupulously using the ‘vous’ form of address) that she had been living in idleness at her brother’s (she described herself as having been a ‘parasseuse’ — lazybones) but now that she was back at the lab she was busy with administration and editing, but looked forward to starting new work once she got the right crystals. On 25 February she was notified of a pay rise (thanks to the promised American money) and a college appointment. Her rank was to be ‘Research Associate in Biophysics’, and her salary would rise to £1,700 a year, plus £80 London allowance, to take effect from October. It was good news, and would have been better were not she and Klug still waiting for the previous salary rises promised, but never paid, the previous October. Still fighting on his behalf, she added her name to his in a joint letter asking for a rise in his salary in line with the general London University increases.

  Welcome as her overdue recognition was, it was hardly the kind of prominence to put a scientist in line for election to the Royal Society. Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, on the other hand, had advanced considerably in reputation since the double helix days of 1953. From the Royal Institution that spring, Sir Lawrence Bragg, in a letter headed ‘Confidential’, wrote to Max Perutz at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge to discuss candidates for fellowship in the Society. Crick, they agreed, took precedence over Wilkins. Bragg said, ‘If you feel you want decisively to run Crick as your horse, perhaps Himsworth [Sir Harold Himsworth, Secretary of the Medical Research Council] and I could put Kendrew up — I’ll test his reactions.’

  I shall of course be glad to sign Crick’s nomination. I imagine Rothschild will be very pleased to see it go forward. I agree with him that Crick ought to get in before Wilkins, I think R. was very worried because W. was so strongly pressed. I should like to see Kendrew go forward at the same time. I am going to have a talk with Himsworth shortly and will write again when I have done so.

  Thus the network operated — gentlemen sorting things out among themselves. Rosalind’s name never came into it. Crick and Wilkins became Fellows of the Royal Society in March 1959, Kendrew the following year.

  Her work was interrupted in the spring not only by intermittent stays at the Royal Marsden but by practical frustrations with her working materials. The polio research had come to a halt because of an incompatibility between the virus and the capillaries in which the crystals were stored. She and Klug were waiting for some neutral glass out of which to make tubes that would not destroy the crystals. The tobacco virus work, on the other hand, was held up for the lack of a heavy atom derivative. Nonetheless, she and Klug submitted a detailed overview of disordered crystals in long-chain molecules (such as TMV and DNA) to Transactions of the Faraday Society.

  In her spare time, Rosalind re-covered the cushions in her flat in bright colours and thought ahead to her visit to Brussels and to her summer travel. Writing to Don Caspar at Yale in mid-March, apologising for the fact that ‘most of the winter has been more or less non-existent for me’, she spoke of her gratitude to Klug for managing to do a good part of her work as well as his own, and she described their troubles with the polio crystals. With her holidays in mind, she suggested that Caspar join her for another excursion:

  I still hope to come over this summer . . . Although I am fairly well at the moment I have, in fact, been in hospital and out again since I got your letter. So it all depends how things go in the next few months.

  If I do come, I should like to come o
ver for the month of August — Phytopathology is the last week of August, and I hope to go to Vienna in the first week of September. If you felt like a trip West during August it would be very nice if we could go over together.

  Best wishes,

  Yours,

  Rosalind

  In her financial negotiations, she was increasingly successful. She won permission for her team to spend nine pounds each to attend the Faraday Society Conference in Leeds in mid-April. The expense was justified, she explained to Bernal, as all four were authors of papers to be presented at the conference. She also arranged that she and Klug could dip into the American funds to cover the costs of the trip to Vienna in August. (Although the US Public Health Service had made the grant, the money was issued by the College Research Grants Committee in its usual penny-pinching manner.) Those were small victories compared to the splendid news that ended her long anxiety about the possible dispersal of her group. Max Perutz came personally to Birkbeck and invited her and Klug to move their work to Cambridge, to the new laboratory being built to house his expanded molecular biology unit from the Cavendish. This transfer would take place about the time that their American grant ran out. Her team’s future was secure at last.

  Towards the end of March, Rosalind was putting in a full working day. Yet she was in a weakened state. She would crawl up the narrow stairs from where the X-ray apparatus was, to her office on the top floor, refusing all offers to be carried as her devoted young associates longed to do. Her courage drove Ken Holmes almost to tears. But she was determined to get the data for a paper on viruses, to be given with Klug and Caspar, at the Bloomington, Indiana conference in August. She had begun some new work on the potato virus and mounted some very tiny crystals and had managed to get a picture. Long columns of figures in her carefully dated notebooks reveal how much she packed into a day. She produced five pages of calculations on 28 March.

  That week she went to dinner with Ken and Mary Holmes and they had a lively evening, Rosalind at her best, telling them stories about Paris and enjoying coffee ground in the grinder she had given them as a wedding present. Friday, 28 March, was Ellis Franklin’s sixty-fourth birthday. At the family dinner celebrating the occasion, her mother, watching carefully, thought she ate well but looked ill. On Sunday Muriel was in the garden when Ellis came out and said to her, ‘Rosalind’s in trouble again.’ His sister Alice had taken Rosalind back to the Marsden. When her parents went to see her, she asked not to be visited the next day — perhaps to spare herself the sight of her mother weeping.

  Rosalind still expected to recover. On the table beside her hospital bed stood an invitation to a six-months fellowship in Caracas. Peggy Dyche, calling into the room regularly, knew, however, that her condition was hopeless. An operation at the Marsden showed that the cancer’s extensive spread meant that nothing could be done. Nonetheless, Peggy kept up the pretence that Rosalind would get better ‘when both she and I knew the worst. I never forgave myself for not breaking through the facade.’

  ‘Breaking through’ would have taken some boldness, for she knew Rosalind very well: ‘There is no doubt that she could be a difficult character — impatient, bossy, intransigent. She always went straight to the point and was seldom diplomatic. However, this was all because she had such high standards and expected everyone else to be able to reach her ideal requirements.’ Peggy sympathised; she saw the same traits in herself.

  Another visitor to the bedside was Jacques Mering. He was shocked at Rosalind’s appearance and had trouble keeping his composure. Her hair was lustreless and she had wasted away to a skeleton. Yet she was cheerful and kept telling him (‘with defiance’, in his recollection) that she would get well. He thought to himself that she was defying death itself. When he left, he stood on a street corner and wept.

  Mering’s tears sprang not only from grief but remorse. He suspected (as he later told Anne Sayre) that Rosalind’s attachment to him might have made it impossible for her to form other relationships, even to entertain the attentions of those other men he felt were paying court to her. Mering was conscious too that, as the older and more experienced of the two, he should have managed her feelings for him better.

  One day when Peggy looked in, Rosalind told her that she could not move one arm; it felt paralysed. She was sure she had polio. Outside the room, Peggy commented to colleagues, ‘There she is dying of cancer and now she thinks she’s got polio.’ But none of them realised that Rosalind had been working with the polio virus. Another day, when Rosalind seemed remarkably improved, with glowing eyes and smiling face, Peggy inquired and was told she had been put on heroin.

  There was no cure. A new treatment — perhaps a new form of chemotherapy — was tried and the hospital noticed ‘a brief flicker of response’, but no more. After two weeks, unable to eat, too feeble to lift her head, sedated by morphine, she fell into delirium. She imagined that she was riding her bicycle across Putney Common during an air raid. When Peggy came into the room, she said, ‘I’m glad you’ve come, Aaron. Now you can help me with those graphs.’

  On Wednesday 16 April, The Times carried an exhilarated report on the Brussels World’s Fair, ‘Atomic Crystal Gazing in Brussels’, which emphasised the scientific thrust of the exposition. Rosalind never saw it. She died that afternoon.

  The cause of death was given as bronchopneumonia, secondary carcinomatosis and carcinoma of the ovary. The brief entry on her death certificate said a great deal in a few words: ‘A Research Scientist, Spinster, Daughter of Ellis Arthur Franklin, a Banker.’

  When the news came, Ken Holmes and James Watt, her PhD student, wept. Finch crept into a nearby church. He could not believe it; he had seen her on her last day at the lab, walking by his door, dignified, head high as always. They all thought themselves tremendously lucky to have worked with her and even then were completing papers bearing her name, four of which would be published posthumously.

  The funeral was held next day at the United Jewish Cemetery in Willesden. Vittorio Luzzati, who was in London, came. So did the team from the lab. The mourners held themselves in two distinct groups — family and scientists. There was little conversation and no gathering afterwards.

  Rosalind was buried in the Franklin family plot, near her Franklin great-grandparents and her grandparents. Each of the gravestones of Arthur Ellis Franklin and his wife Caroline proclaims, ‘This stone was obtained from the Holy Land.’ Rosalind’s says, ‘Scientist: her work on viruses was of lasting benefit to mankind.’

  Rosalind sank into her grave, as Yeats said of Keats, ‘His senses and his heart unsatisfied.’ Yet her work surpassed her most optimistic expectations. She had published, on her own or with others, thirty-seven scientific papers. Her death was noticed in The Times, New York Times (acknowledging her ‘widespread recognition for her research on virus structure’: or: ‘one of a select band of pioneers unravelling the structure of nucleo-proteins in relation to virus diseases and genetics’) and Nature.

  J.D. Bernal’s long admiration for Rosalind was expressed with erudite grace in a masterly obituary which appeared under a two-column heading in The Times on 19 April. He opened with the declaration ‘Rosalind Franklin’s early and tragic death is a great loss to science’ and the statement that she had made a distinguished name in two very different branches of research, the study of coal and coke, then in nucleo-proteins and virus structure. Bernal then gave deserved attention to her earlier work:

  She discovered in a series of beautifully executed researches, the fundamental distinction between carbons that turned on heating into graphite and those that did not. Further, she related the difference to the chemical constitution of the molecules from which the carbon was made. She was already a recognised authority in industrial physicochemistry when she chose to abandon this work in favour of the far more difficult and more exciting fields of biophysics.

  Then he moved on to her work on deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) at King’s College London:

  By the most ingenious e
xperimental and mathematical techniques of X-ray analysis, she was able to verify and make more precise the illuminating hypothesis of Crick and Watson on the double spiral structure of this substance. She established definitely that the main sugar phosphate chain of nucleic acid lay on an outside spiral and not on an inner one, as had been authoritatively suggested.

  When she moved to Birkbeck, Bernal wrote, she took up the tobacco mosaic virus, ‘almost at once using the techniques she had already developed, made notable advances on it . . . She then made her greatest contribution in locating the infective element of the virus particle — its characteristic ribose nucleic acid.’ He described her international recognition, particularly the American grant, and her new direction, the polio virus. He praised not only the ‘apparently effortless skill’ of her brilliant individual research but her gift as an organiser of research, ‘as the small and devoted team she gathered round her bears witness’. ‘Her life,’ he concluded, ‘is an example of single-minded devotion to scientific research.’

  Bernal surpassed himself in his obituary for Nature: ‘As a scientist Miss Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook. Her photographs are among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken.’