Rosalind Franklin (2 page)

PROLOGUE

‘It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.'

 

This celebrated understatement published in
Nature
on 25 April 1953 was Francis Crick's and James Watson's way of heralding the significance of their discovery of the double helix, the self-copying spirals of the DNA molecule that carry the genetic message from old cells to new. Another statement, written in a private letter on 7 March 1953, has achieved a fame of its own: ‘Our dark lady is leaving us next week.'

For Francis Crick of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, the ‘dark lady' needed no further identification. For nearly two years, his friend Maurice Wilkins of the Biophysics Unit at King's College London had been moaning about his obstructive female colleague, Rosalind Franklin. Now that she was abandoning King's for Birkbeck, another University of London college, Wilkins was confident that he, Crick, and Watson, a young American working with Crick, together would solve the structure of DNA. But it was too late. By the time that Wilkins's letter reached Cambridge, the pair whose names will be forever linked were looking at their completed model whose simplicity proclaimed that they had discovered the secret of life.

But could Watson and Crick have done it without the ‘dark lady': Rosalind Franklin, the thirty-two-year-old physical chemist whose departure from King's Wilkins so eagerly awaited? Her research data, which had reached them by a circuitous route and without her consent, had been crucial to their discovery. Watson's glimpse of one of her X-ray photographs of DNA gave him and Crick the final boost to the summit. From the evidence of her notebooks, it is clear that she would have got there by herself before long.

The triumph was theirs, not hers. Rosalind Franklin remained virtually unknown outside her immediate circles until 1968 when Watson published
The Double Helix,
his brilliant, tactless and exciting personal account of the discovery. In it, she is the terrible ‘Rosy', the bad-tempered bluestocking who hoarded her data and might have been pretty if she had taken off her glasses and done something interesting with her hair.

She looked quite different to the eminent physics professor J.D. Bernal, who brought her to Birkbeck in the spring and oversaw her five happy and productive years there. He described her in
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.'

But Bernal's words were elegiac. Rosalind Franklin's life was cut short by ovarian cancer in 1958 when she was thirty-seven — four years before Watson, Crick and Wilkins won the Nobel prize for their DNA discovery and a decade before she was caricatured in a book to which, alone of the principals portrayed, she was unable to answer back.

Since Watson's book, Rosalind Franklin has become a feminist icon, the Sylvia Plath of molecular biology, the woman whose gifts were sacrificed to the greater glory of the male. Yet this mythologising, intended to be reparative, has done her no favours. There was far more to her complex, fruitful, vigorous life than twenty-seven unhappy months at King's College London. She achieved an international reputation in three different fields of scientific research while at the same time nourishing a passion for travel, a gift for friendship, a love of clothes and good food and a strong political conscience. She never flagged in her duties to the distinguished Anglo-Jewish family of which she was a loyal, if combative, member.

Determined from the age of twelve to become a scientist, Rosalind Franklin knew where she came from, under what constraints she laboured and where she wanted to go. From childhood, she strove to reconcile her privileges with her goals. She did not find life easy — as a woman, as a Jew, as a scientist. Many of those close to her did not find her easy either. The measure of her success lies in the strength of her friendships, the devotion of her colleagues, the vitality of her letters and a legacy of discovery that would do credit to a scientific career twice its length.

 

‘You look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralising invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment . . .

I agree that faith is essential to success in life ... In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall come nearer to success and that success in our aims (the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future) is worth attaining.'

 

Rosalind Franklin as a Cambridge undergraduate arguing against her father's faith in life after death.

Part One

ONE
Once in Royal David's City

T
HE FAMILY
into which Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born on 25 July 1920, stood high in Anglo-Jewry. Not at the very top: the highest rank was occupied by the oldest Jewish families in England, the Sephardi Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent who arrived at the time of Cromwell. Nor were the Franklins among the wealthiest of the Ashkenazis from northern Europe, such as the Rothschilds and Goldsmids, who came to England in the eighteenth century seeking opportunity for trade. Yet they were well within the elite network known as ‘The Cousinhood', so common was intermarriage.

The first of their English line arrived as Fraenkel from Breslau in Silesia in 1763 and anglicised the name to Franklin, as was sensible. The English were uncomfortable with foreign names, and Jewishness was no advantage at a time there were only 8,000 Jews in England. Benjamin Wolf Franklin lived in the City of London, on Cock Court, Jewry Street. A rabbi and teacher, he married Sarah, the daughter of Lazarus Joseph, originally Lazarus Israel, who emigrated to England from Hamburg around 1760. Benjamin and Sarah had six children before dying in an epidemic in 1785.Their gravestones still stand in the burial ground in Globe Road Cemetery, Mile End, East London.

The two surviving Franklin sons, Abraham and Lewis, went to Portsmouth for apprenticeships in watchmaking and shop-keeping and became successful businessmen. In 1815 or 1816 the brothers shifted to Liverpool and Manchester where they entered firms engaged in money-changing, banking and trade with the West Indies. In time, the Samuels of Liverpool (another line of Silesian exiles) were braided into the Franklin fabric. Over the generations the Abrahams became Alfreds and Arthurs, and the ancestral surname Israel became Ellis. In 1852 the grandson of the original immigrant, Ellis A. Franklin, joined Louis Samuel from Liverpool in the bullion-broking firm of Samuel Montagu and Co., and the alliance was cemented when Ellis married Samuel Montagu's sister.

From 1868 the Franklin family's financial base lay in the City of London, in A. Keyser and Co., a private merchant bank spun off from Samuel Montagu and Co. Keyser's, a source of employment for Franklin sons for the next century, became independent in 1908 and specialised in placing American rail bonds in the City. Among the City's so-called ‘Jewish banks', Keyser's was the only one to observe all the Jewish holidays.

From 1902 Franklins were publishers as well as bankers. Keyser's bought the house of George Routledge from the receivers in 1902 and in 1911 took over another ailing publisher, Kegan Paul. This acquisition created a refuge for Franklin males disinclined to banking.

In 1862, in line with the exodus from the City of London where the Jews had clustered, Ellis Franklin shifted to west London and the wealthy Jewish enclave in Bayswater. There he was one of the founders of the New West End Synagogue on St Petersburgh Place. His seven children, all of whom married within the faith, made the family known for prodigious philanthropic zeal — a leading example of the Jewish tradition of repaying the privilege of wealth through service to those less fortunate. In succeeding generations there was scarcely a Jewish organisation, hospital or old people's home without a Franklin on the board and many secular charities benefited from their dedication as well.

On her mother's side Rosalind's antecedents were intellectual and professional. The Waleys had been in England even longer than the Franklins, having arrived in Portsmouth in 1740 as Levis. Rosalind's maternal great-grandfather, Jacob Waley, took first place in mathematics and classics at University College London, and later became professor of mathematics at the University of London while also practising at the bar. He too was active in Jewish good works, as a founder of the United Synagogue (an association of nominally Orthodox synagogues which observed the German or Polish ritual), and first president of the Anglo- Jewish Association. In a prime example of ‘The Cousinhood' in action, he married Matilda Salomons, a niece of both Sir Moses Montefiore and Sir David Salomons, the first Jewish Lord Mayor of London.

Anglo-Jewry was a happy breed: secure, able, influential, socially conscious, cosmopolitan. Its members dressed for dinner, were presented at Court, had their portraits painted by Singer Sargent. Many kept Christmas and Passover, ate kosher and played cricket. The price of belonging was intermarriage. But there was no need for exogamy — the dreaded ‘marrying out'. As prolific as other families of the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras, the clans produced enough offspring to stock a generous marriage pool, and to speed the path to it through a well-organised social round of dances, picnics, theatre parties and country weekends. Rosalind's parents, Ellis Franklin and Muriel Waley, met at an engagement party at the family house in Porchester Terrace, Bayswater, and began their courtship by escaping for a long walk across Hyde Park.

Which was the stronger loyalty — to country or to faith? There was nothing to choose. As Rosalind's father said when reorganising the New West End Synagogue after the Second World War, ‘The whole idea is that Judaism is a religion not a race . . . the English Jews are as much English as other English.'

 

The discovery of the secret of the gene involves a genealogy as long as any in the history of the planet. Elders of the Franklin clan claimed direct descent from King David, founder of Jerusalem, reigning king of Israel c.1000 to c.962 BC, around whom the messianic expectations of the people of Israel clustered. The lineage was spelled out by Rosalind's grandfather, Arthur E. Franklin, in a thick blue book beautifully produced by Routledge, the family firm.

‘It may appear strange,' he conceded in his introduction, ‘that anyone living in the fourteenth [actually fifteenth] century could trace his descent from King David.' He then proceeded to lay out the evidence. Name by name, date by date, he followed the Franklin blood line back through the Bohemian Jewish communities of the Holy Roman Empire to the great Rabbi Lowe of Prague, who died in Prague in 1609, a scholar, writer (allegedly the creator of the Golem, a supernatural monster), scientist and friend of Tycho Brahe, the astronomer. From there he followed the trail farther back to another ancestor, the Imperial Rabbi of Prague who died in 1439.

Arthur Franklin acknowledged that there was a large gap between 1038 and 1439 where the record was missing, probably destroyed in a fire in Prague in 1689. However, from other books on the history of the Jews in Bohemia and with help from the synagogue library at Breslau, he had reconstituted the missing links with the Exilarchs of Babylon, rulers of the Jews expelled from Jerusalem in 587 BC after the fall of the First Temple. Thus the Franklins, as he saw them, were descendants of the Exilarchs. The office of Exilarch was always held by a descendant of the House of David. Therefore, in the second edition of
The Franklin Family and Collaterals,
published in 1935, he confidently placed Jehoiachin, the first Exilarch of Babylon, on page 67, and Rosalind Elsie Franklin, second child and first daughter of Ellis and Muriel (Waley) Franklin, on page 85.

The intellectual component of this genetic inheritance was clear: the Franklins came from a line of scholars and leaders. That said, what mattered just as much to Arthur Franklin was that the 3,500 entries recorded in his family history represented ‘a fair proportion of the English Jews whose families were settled here [England] before the Napoleonic wars'. His own proud boast was that three out of his four grandparents were of English birth.

Old Jewry indeed. In class-stratified Edwardian England, eighteenth-century origin placed the Franklins in the upper middle class, high above the new wave of Jews crowding into London's East End in flight from the pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. Thus the Franklins were archetypal — to use a term they did not use of themselves — assimilated Jews.

 

By the time Rosalind was born in 1920, the Franklin family and collaterals stood high in British public life. Three weeks before her birth, the great-uncle she would call ‘Uncle Herbert' was installed in Jerusalem as the first High Commissioner of Palestine. So well established was Herbert Samuel that he received the mandated territory from its military commander in the form of a light-hearted receipt: ‘Handed over to Sir Herbert Samuel, one Palestine, complete.'

For Herbert Samuel of Liverpool, who in 1897 had married his cousin, Beatrice Franklin, the Palestine commission was one more step in a distinguished political career. In 1909 when appointed chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in H.H. Asquith's Liberal government, he became the first practising Jew to sit on the British Cabinet. (Although Jewish, Benjamin Disraeli, the Victorian prime minister, was a baptised Anglican.) Samuel rose to become Postmaster General, then in January 1916, Home Secretary, a post he held for a significant year which included the Easter Rising in Dublin and the summary execution of the rebellion leaders. Samuel had no natural sympathy for national aspirations of colonised people when these clashed with British interests or loyalty to the Crown. He resigned in December 1916 upon the formation of David Lloyd George's wartime coalition government.

Before leaving office Samuel wrote the memorandum that resulted in the Balfour Declaration in 1917. In ‘The Future of Palestine', he outlined a plan whereby after the war and the presumed collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Britain would assume a protectorate over Palestine and encourage Jewish immigration until a majority was reached and Palestine could be granted self- government. ( Jews at the time comprised only one-sixth of the population.) Explaining his reasoning, Samuel declared: that the link between Palestine and the Jews was as old as history, that Jews all around the world would be grateful (Britain was hoping to bring the United States into the war) and (with a nod to the eugenics theory popular at the time) that ‘The Jewish brain was a physiological product not to be despised.'

However, Samuel accepted assignment as Palestine's first High Commissioner with a heavy heart. Like much of Anglo-Jewry, he was uneasy about the so-called national homeland, for Britain was their home. He had taken pains to make it clear that nothing should be done in Palestine ‘which may prejudice the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country'.

 

English Jews fought the Jewish stereotype with incomplete success. Disraeli never threw off the shadow, despite baptism, a Christian wife and the efforts of a father who had removed the foreign-looking apostrophe from the family name, d'Israeli. ‘Somehow,' a parliamentary sketchwriter observed in 1871, ‘Englishmen have never yet been able to give their confidence to anyone who bears the unmistakeable traces of Jewish origins . . . had he been of British descent, like his lifelong rival Mr Gladstone, everything would have been forgiven.'

Disraeli's cleverness and the charm he held for Queen Victoria were ascribed to his Jewishness. So too was Herbert Samuel's ingenuity in designing the Balfour Declaration. Asquith described Samuel's plan to his friend Venetia Stanley as ‘a curious illustration of Dizzy's favourite maxim that “race is everything”'.

‘The Jew' was part of the cultural landscape in the country which in 1290, after prolonged harassment, had expelled them as well-poisoners, liars, usurers and baby-eaters. Dickens, in
A Child's History of England,
wrote of their plight at the time of Edward I:

 

in this reign they were most unmercifully pillaged. They were hanged in great numbers . . . heavily taxed; . . . disgracefully badgered . . . thrown into beastly prisons until they purchased their release . . . Finally, every kind of property belonging to them was seized by the King . . . Many years elapsed before the hope of gain induced any of their race to return to England, where they had been treated so heartlessly, and had suffered so much.

 

Cromwell allowed Jews back in 1656 after the Civil War. With the dawn of capitalism and the spread of trade the prosperous among them were welcome — up to a point. When the ‘Jew Bill' of 1753 was introduced to make it easier for them to become naturalised British subjects, there were anti-Jewish riots and the bill was withdrawn.

They survived by becoming more English than the English, doing nothing — no loud voices, extravagant hand gestures, bright colours or conspicuous consumption — to evoke the ‘bad Jew' qualities of Shylock, in
The Merchant of Venice,
written when Jews had been absent from England for 300 years.

Their numbers were still small (20,000—30,000) at the beginning of the twentieth century when the new wave of immigration threatened Anglo-Jews' hard-won acceptance by the host society. Charitable institutions were swiftly established to prevent those seen as ‘not our kind of Jew' from seeking public welfare or otherwise stirring up the anti-semitism latent in English life.

Assimilation, however heartfelt, never looked complete. The hint of something eastern, alien and untrustworthy was carried in the strange language, with its curving oriental script, used for what the composer Richard Wagner, an ardent anti-semite, called ‘the hidden discourse of the Jews'. The Jewish insistence on marrying within the tribe contradicted their claim to have adapted to the dominant culture. Intermarriage could also be read as inbreeding, with even darker connotations of insanity.

It was hardly possible to get through English schooling in the twentieth century without knowing of Shakespeare's Shylock, with his ‘Jewish heart', moaning over his lost ducats, or of Ivanhoe choosing the fair Saxon Rowena over the raven-tressed Rebecca the Jewess.

If behaving well was the best defence, to the unsympathetic eye it looked like deception. Success and wealth were mixed blessings. Too much of either invited charges of avarice, materialism and profiteering. The tireless philanthropy of affluent English Jewry could be interpreted as looking after their own kind, or at very least, a defensive protection of position. The easy internationalism of the Jews was seen as a conspiracy, a desire for profit that had perhaps fomented the First World War. A character in
The Thirty-Nine Steps,
written in 1915 by John Buchan, who was director of information for the Lloyd George wartime government, maintains ‘The Jew is everywhere . . . with an eye like a rattlesnake. He is the man who is ruling the world just now . . .'