Rosalind Franklin

by Brenda Maddox

  Amid a long and considered summary of her work and her foreign collaboration and a tribute to her courage in working right up to the end, Bernal subtly addressed the apportionment of credit for the discovery of the double helix of DNA:

  In this close collaboration between the Cambridge and London schools it is difficult to disentangle all the contributions of individuals, but what Miss Franklin had to give was the technique of preparing and taking X-ray photographs of the two hydrated forms of deoxyribonucleic acid and by applying the methods of Patterson function analysis to show that the structure was best accounted for by a double spiral of nucleotides, in which the phosphorus atoms lay on the outside.

  Her family was stunned by Bernal’s obituary in The Times. Coinciding, as it did, with the exhibition of Rosalind’s model at the Brussels World’s Fair, it made them realise how very good a scientist she had been. As her Aunt Alice wrote to Anne Sayre a week after Rosalind’s death, ‘She was very modest and also knowing it was Greek to us — she did not waste time in talking about her work with those who would irritate her by silly questions.’

  This self-deprecating comment from a highly able woman illustrates (as does, in many ways, Rosalind’s entire career) the isolation of the scientist, cut off from ordinary discourse, even with loved ones, about what is of most intense interest in his or her daily life.

  After Rosalind’s death, Klug invited Muriel Franklin to visit 2i Torrington Place to show her where and how her daughter had worked. He showed her around the small top-floor room, with its neatly labelled test-tubes and the white lab coat still hanging on the back of the door. He praised the originality and delicacy Rosalind brought to her experiments.

  His words drove the grieving mother back — perhaps to thoughts of the homesick little girl at boarding-school knitting a scarf for Nannie. ‘Rosalind was always good at sewing,’ she said.

  EPILOGUE

  Life After Death

  ‘CONCERNING ROSALIND,’ Maurice Wilkins wrote James Watson in 1966, ‘is there any mention in your book that she died?’

  ‘Your book’ was ‘Honest Jim’ an early draft of The Double Helix, Watson’s candid, fast-paced account of the discovery of the structure of DNA. In it Rosalind Franklin is ‘Rosy’, the termagant who hoarded data she couldn’t comprehend, treated men like naughty little boys and wore dresses even dowdier than those of the average Englishwoman.

  Watson could not have given the world his ‘Rosy’ if Rosalind had been alive. He began writing the book as a Harvard professor, three years after he, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins had won the Nobel prize for medicine and physiology. Watson submitted the book to Harvard University Press, which liked it but required the written consent of those prominently and candidly mentioned. Francis Crick and Wilkins objected most strongly — in Crick’s case, with some anger. Linus Pauling also cast a veto. In a fierce letter to Crick, with nine copies, including one to Nathan Pusey, president of Harvard, Pauling condemned the portrayals of himself, his wife, his son, Francis Crick, Sir Lawrence Bragg and Rosalind Franklin.

  Rosalind’s brother Colin, as one of Rosalind’s trustees and a publisher, was one of those sent a draft of the book. He was outraged. He shot off a cable containing what Watson considered ‘a rather hysterical reaction’ about ‘defaming the dead’. When Charlotte Franklin, Colin’s wife, followed with a ‘sensible’ (Watson’s word) letter, Watson considered that he should perhaps put in an epilogue.

  Max Perutz too complained about the treatment of Rosalind. As he later wrote in the London Daily Telegraph, ‘I was furious about his maligning that gifted girl who could not defend herself because she died of cancer in 1958; but I could not get him to change it . . . Not that she was unattractive or did not care about her looks. She dressed much more tastefully than the average Cambridge undergraduate . . .’

  In response, Watson composed a pious epilogue stating what a fine scientist Rosalind Franklin had been, and how, as a young man, he had not appreciated the difficulties of a woman making her way in the man’s world of science.

  The many revisions Watson made to the early drafts did not placate his critics. Wilkins wrote T.J. Wilson, the director of Harvard University Press, to declare that although some of the grosser factual errors had been corrected, he nonetheless felt it disgraceful that a university press should be party to a distinguished member of its staff making such a display of immaturity and bad taste. Watson’s book, Wilkins declared, was ‘unfair to me, to Dr Crick and to almost everyone mentioned except Professor Watson himself ‘.

  Faced with such formidable opposition, Harvard’s Board of Overseers made its press drop the book. It complied, and lost a bestseller. Instead, The Double Helix was published by the Athenaeum Press in New York in February 1968, and by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in London in May, the original portrait of Rosy intact. The stilted afterword tacked on to the end of a racy tale did nothing to erase the impression of the virago ready to spring.

  Rosalind’s parents were deeply upset: bad enough to have lost their daughter, now this gratuitous and painful insult. Aaron Klug, visiting them, suggested that the book at least ensured that Rosalind would always be remembered. Muriel Franklin replied, ‘I would rather she were forgotten than remembered in this way.’

  The Double Helix was an instant success, welcomed for dispelling the myth that science is done by dispassionate intellects moving with deliberation towards defined goals. Nature called the book ‘spellbinding and a considerable public service’. Jacob Bronowski said in The Nation that the book ‘communicates the spirit of science as no formal account has ever done’. In the United States it was nominated for the National Book Award.

  J.D. Bernal, reviewing The Double Helix for Labour Monthly, gently corrected the book’s portrait of Rosalind while at the same time deflating Watson and Crick. He wrote ‘a decisive break-through in human thought is not necessarily the work of an individual genius but only of a pack of bright and well-financed research workers following a good well-laid trail’. Bernal credited Rosalind with a significant part in laying the trail:

  For ‘Rosy’, in the book — I had come to know and respect her and to admire her too, as a very intelligent and brave woman who was the first to recognise and to measure the phosphorus atoms in the helix, which proves to be the outer one, thus showing Pauling to be wrong and the helix to be a double one, though this inference is not drawn.

  Praise for the book was not unanimous. The 1960s were not the 1950s; the women’s movement had begun. By 1968, lines such as: ‘Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place ... ; ‘Certainly a bad way to go out into the foulness of a heavy, foggy November night was to be told by a woman to refrain from venturing an opinion about a subject for which you were not trained’, and ‘the best home for a feminist was in another person’s lab’ were as unacceptable as jokes about women drivers and dumb blondes.

  Mary Ellmann, whose Thinking About Women appeared the same year and launched feminist literary criticism, recognised the misogyny underlying The Double Helix. In The Yale Review she mocked its pretence to show ‘the scientist as human being, with genes in the morning, girls in the evening’ and commented sarcastically, ‘The only contradiction of this sensible balance is Rosalind Franklin, the woman who studies DNA like a man. . .Why couldn’t she content herself with playing assistant to Wilkins (and over his shoulder, to Crick and Watson)?’ Elizabeth Janeway, in another feminist text, Man’s World, Woman’s Place, attacked as misogynist even Watson’s portrait of Odile Crick as the air-headed pretty wife who thinks that gravity stops two miles up.

  In ensuing decades, the myth of the wronged heroine has grown, nourished by the fact of Rosalind’s early death. Rosalind Franklin has become the symbol of women’s lowly position in the pantheon of science. In 1997, when an American neuroscientist, Candace Pert, was passed over for the Lasker Award (sometimes called ‘the American Nobel’) she felt she deserved, she blamed anti-female prejudice. It was just what had happened to Rosalind Franklin, she m
aintained. In Molecules of Emotion, Pert went so far as to suggest that Franklin’s cancer ‘had been exacerbated by the humiliation she suffered at the hands of these, and probably many other, old boys’.

  The Double Helix is now established as a twentieth-century classic, published in eighteen languages: a candid young-man’s-eye view of one of science’s great discoveries. Watson wrote what, at twenty-three, he felt and saw happening. Yet a cloud of guilt hovers over the tale from the very first page. The book opens in 1955, with Jim Watson climbing a slope in the Swiss Alps. Suddenly he recognises one of the party of climbers coming down. It is Willy Seeds, from King’s College London. Instead of pausing for a chat with an old friend in an unfamiliar place, Seeds merely says, ‘How’s Honest Jim?’ and passes by.

  The reader has no way of knowing that the ever-sardonic Seeds meant the very opposite of ‘honest’. In 1955, only two years after the discovery of the double helix, scientists at King’s had not forgiven Watson for helping himself to King’s data to win fame. Seeds’s gibe clearly hit home, for Watson made ‘Honest Jim’ the book’s working title. Another discarded title — ‘Base Pairs’ — carries the same self-accusation.

  Watson was intentionally ironic. He genuinely liked the sound of ‘Honest Jim’ for its echoes of Lucky Jim — Kingsley’s Amis’s 1954 comic masterpiece about a maladroit young instructor who exposes the pomposity of the British academic establishment. It may not be too far-fetched to think that in Watson’s unconscious, as he shaped his narrative, lodged not only the bumbling honest Jim Dixon but the neurotic female lecturer Margaret Peel (‘quite horribly well done’, said the New Statesman), with her tasteless clothes and utter ignorance of how to appeal to a man.

  Over the years, Watson repeatedly indulged in public admissions of unease. In 1999, in his book A Passion for DNA, he looked back to the publication of The Double Helix and joked: ‘I daydreamed that the New Yorker might print it under the rubric ‘‘Annals of Crime’’ because there were those who thought Francis and I had no right to think about other people’s data and had in fact stolen the double helix from Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin. ‘

  As decades went by, Watson defended himself before young audiences who had little idea of what he was supposed to be guilty of. In London in 1984, addressing the Science Society at Rosalind’s old school, St Paul’s, he declared that he and Crick had not robbed Rosalind. ‘We used her data to think about, not to steal,’ he said. He tried to explain why he and Crick and not she had made the discovery: ‘It wasn’t because she was a woman or that we were more intelligent. We were more interested in DNA than she was, more interested because of our education and our friends.’ He went on to make some remarks about Rosalind’s inflexibility, then to inform the schoolgirls: ‘She had terrible relations with her family. Indeed she went to stay with the Cricks after her hospital treatment.’

  (Afterwards, the head of chemistry at St Paul’s, Richard Walker, candidly recorded in his notes: ‘quite the most provocative and stimulating lecture we’ve had! The science block is still humming to the comments of ‘‘that horrible man’’.’)

  Fifteen years later, and forty-six years after he walked into Rosalind’s room at King’s and saw her bending over the lighted box, Watson was still justifying himself. As President of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, returning to Harvard to inaugurate its Center for Genomic Research, he began with a flashback to that critical day in January 1953:

  Let’s just start with the Pauling thing. There’s a myth which is, you know, that Francis and I basically stole the structure from the people at King’s. I was shown Rosalind Franklin’s x-ray photograph and, Whooo! that was a helix, and a month later we had the structure, and Wilkins should never have shown me the thing.

  I didn’t go into the drawer and steal it, it was shown to me, and I was told the dimensions, a repeat of 34 Ängstroms, so, you know, I knew roughly what it meant and, uh, but it was that the Franklin photograph was the key event. It was, psychologically, it mobilised us . . .

  One new element added in the repeated retelling of the story is the admission that Rosalind’s Photograph 51 was the pivotal moment in the discovery of the double helix.

  Something was done that ought not to have been done, but what? Not the showing of Photograph 51. That concerned Raymond Gosling. He had participated in the work and, as has been said, he had every reason to give the small square X-ray print to Wilkins. If Wilkins was unwise in letting Watson have a look at it, there was no intended subversion; he did not, in that pre-photocopying era, make Watson a copy.

  Rather, Watson’s continuing sense of unease may well derive from the use of Rosalind’s experimental data behind her back and never telling her openly — not even in the subsequent years of their friendly collaboration. Neither did Crick. Such acknowledgement as they gave her was very muted and always coupled with the name of Wilkins. For example a lengthy footnote appended to their 1954 paper for the Proceedings of the Royal Society says, well into the text,

  The information reported in this section [about the two different forms, A and B, of DNA] was very kindly reported to us prior to its publication by Drs. Wilkins and Franklin. We are most heavily indebted in this respect to the King’s College Group, and we wish to point out that without this data the formulation of our picture would have been most unlikely, if not impossible.

  The fact was that Rosalind did not report this information to them herself and she was not even speaking to Wilkins. To her dying, day Rosalind could not have dreamed that Watson and Crick would be declaring from public platforms half a century later that they could not have found the double helix in March 1953 without her experimental work.

  Some scientists have accused Watson’s book of undermining the ethics of science, demonstrating to young people that winning justifies all. Rosalind’s friend David Harker, formerly of Brooklyn Polytechnic, later head of biophysics at the Roswell Park Memorial Institute at Buffalo, New York, put his objections thus:

  the real tragedy in this affair is the very shady behavior by a number of people, as well as a number of unfortunate accidents, which resulted in the transfer of information in an irregular way . . . I would never have consciously become involved in anything like this behavior . . . And I think these people are — to the extent that they did these things — outside scientific morals, as I know them.

  Why did Watson create Rosy the Witch? A plausible hypothesis holds that the character was a rationalisation of Watson’s guilt — a creature so hostile and uncooperative that there was no alternative to taking what you need by stealth. Gunther Stent, biochemist and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of The Double Helix, compares the book’s moral dilemma to Lawrence Kohlberg’s tale of ‘Penniless Heinz and the Mean Druggist’: a good husband steals from a mean druggist the medicine essential to save his wife’s life.

  From the feminine point of view, the wicked Rosy is a variant of an older myth, ‘She asked for it’, that traces back to Eve: the woman is guiltier than the male. Unwittingly, Nannie Griffiths drew on this ancient lie when blaming young Rosalind for complaining that Colin had hit her with a cricket bat: ‘Well dear, you shouldn’t have been teasing him.’

  What cannot be denied is that ‘Rosy’ was essential as villainess for the plot for what Wilkins sometimes called ‘Jim’s novel’. Extraneous details, such as later friendship or early death, would have spoiled the narrative.

  Unhappily, Rosalind’s denigration did not end with The Double Helix. When outright mockery became impolitic, she began to be damned with faint praise; she has been called ‘sound’ and ‘a good experimentalist’, her ability and intelligence downgraded. It has been suggested that she was plodding, that she could not understand her own data or work in teams, accept criticism or use imagination.

  That none of these alleged inadequacies manifested themselves in Rosalind’s work on viruses or coal is ignored by her detractors. Instead, her failure to get the DNA structure in twenty-seven unhappy months at King’s Col
lege is laid to an almost wilful blindness. Horace Freeland Judson, the science historian, has said that when, in 1952, Rosalind failed to listen to Crick’s warnings about alternative explanations for her DNA data, ‘Franklin betrayed a grievous slowness of intuitive response.’ Yet the solution she reached in her classic papers on coal has been called ‘quite witty’, while her TMV work is acknowledged as outstanding. Marjorie M’Ewen, who worked with Rosalind at King’s College, said, ‘Rosalind’s final, brilliant, work on TMV received such universal acclamation it is tragic that her scientific reputation was not allowed to rest thereon.’

  It was not. The more sophisticated Crick is not blameless. In ‘How to Live with a Golden Helix’, an article in The Sciences in September 1979, he wrote:

  Rosalind’s difficulties and failures were mainly of her own making. Underneath her brisk manner she was oversensitive and, ironically, too determined to be scientifically sound and to avoid shortcuts. She was rather too set on succeeding all by herself and rather too stubborn to accept advice easily from others when it ran counter to her own ideas.

  But she was not ‘set on succeeding all by herself’. Her close collaboration with Mering and later Klug, Holmes and Finch shows that she could be an inspiring teamworker. Her letters to Crick himself demonstrate that she not only invited but welcomed his tough criticisms on her TMV papers, even when these contradicted her own ideas.

  Like Watson, Crick felt the need to find a cause for her obstinacy and found it in her family. In ‘How to Live with a Golden Helix’, he said: