Rosalind Franklin (21 page)

Watson brought out the motherly instincts in the Cambridge wives who saw that he was very interested in girls, but unsuccessful. Crick, on the other hand, was full of easy charm and confidence — too much for Sir Lawrence Bragg if not for the impressionable Watson.

The erudite, sarcastic Viennese Chargaff listened to the two burble on about the pitch and spacing of a likely helical structure for DNA and cast his withering eye on the pair — Watson was too gauche, Crick too slick. When he learned that Crick did not even know the chemical differences between the four bases of DNA, he formed the thought that they were ‘two pitchmen in search of a helix': sharp salesmen flogging a dubious product. But Chargaff was not to have the last laugh. Even he did not know the meaning of the ‘Chargaff ratios' — the strange complementary pairings that he had discovered.

Sometime between 8 June and 1 July 1952, Rosalind told Randall she was leaving King's. Did she jump or was she pushed? There is evidence both ways. Some observers maintain that Randall told her she had to go; the situation in his lab was impossible. Her own letters sound as if the initiative were entirely hers. However, Randall, in his devious way, may well have had an encouraging word with Bernal in advance of Rosalind's initial approach. What is certain is that Randall did nothing to persuade her to stay. He must have been delighted to have this easy solution to a nagging problem. The paperwork was swiftly done. On i July the head of her Turner and Newall Fellowships Committee formally notified Randall that Miss R.E. Franklin had applied for permission to spend the third year of her fellowship in the crystallographic laboratory of Professor Bernal at Birkbeck to ‘continue to study the structure of Biological substances by means of X-ray diffraction'. Two days later Randall recommended that the move be made as from 1 January 1953. And on 21 July the chairman of the Fellowships Committee gave his formal assent.

By then Rosalind and Gosling were in a new room at King's, upstairs, more removed from the rest than before. The Patterson functions were giving what she called ‘banana-shaped peaks'. Willy Seeds looking in the door got the impression of Rosalind and Gosling working on the Patterson, week after week, buried in paper, getting nowhere, buried in tables, slide rules and desk calculations requiring extreme concentration.

‘We spent
ages,'
said Gosling. ‘We had to think in three dimensions.' Thus months were wasted? ‘Not wasted at all!' said Gosling. As Rosalind reasoned: ‘How will a model show which structure is right? The Patterson will
tell
us the structure.' He and Rosalind had a lot of arguments about the reflecting planes of the crystal structure, she throwing in her favourite expressions: ‘Rubbish!', ‘It's just not sound!', and ‘It's not logical.' Gosling had trouble visualising the geometry of the arcs they were drawing, so Rosalind sent him out to buy big navel oranges which they used to simulate the spatial relations of the several curves. ‘By the time we had finished,' said Gosling, ‘there was quite a lot of orange peel on the floor.' There were also, in time, three serious papers in
Acta Crystallographica
to share their results with the scientific world.

On 18 July 1952 — with the air of freedom in her nostrils — Rosalind took her fountain pen and in capital letters wrote on a 3 x 6 inch card with a hand-inked black border a death notice for the DNA helix.

Wilkins was greatly upset by this prank. The practical jokes so enjoyed by many scientists were not his style, and about to go off to Brazil for a month to lecture on biophysics, he had no time for games.

To Gosling, Rosalind was simply playing devil's advocate. The ‘death notice' referred only to the A form — ‘crystalline' — of DNA. At no time, Gosling has said, did she believe the structure of the B form was anything other than helical. She could see how well Stokes's theories fitted her evidence. But she believed that it was impossible to prove the helix by model building and her arguments with Maurice were — so Gosling thought — an escape mechanism to ensure she was left alone to pursue the job to which she felt she had been assigned: to find the structure directly from the data, not from guesswork.

Stokes later admitted that he and Wilkins took the ‘death' notice more seriously than Rosalind and Gosling intended. There was a ‘memorial' meeting of sorts — a ceremony, a bit of an academic joke — but the spots were real. Rosalind had the Pattersons spread out all over the table. She and Gosling both wanted to display their evidence that offered an alternative explanation for the A form that was not helical.

 

 

Herbert Wilson, a doctoral student on a fellowship from the University of Wales, began working with Wilkins in the autumn of 1952, comparing DNA and nucleoprotein from the same source. He became aware of the unusual situation: Wilkins, who was responsible for initiating the DNA X-ray studies at King's and to whom Signer had given his precious DNA samples, was now excluded from studying it. Hearing Maurice mutter about Rosalind hoarding the best DNA for herself, Wilson asked the obvious question. Why not ask for some of the Signer DNA back? Wilkins strictly forbade him to do so.

There was no point. Rosalind was leaving on 1 January. Then Wilkins would have the Signer DNA all to himself. Wilkins continued to make regular visits to Cambridge. (Colleagues at King's had his fondness for Odile Crick as the motive.)

That term, disregarding Rosalind's warning, Pauline Cowan also came to King's. There were not a lot of jobs available and she was interested in biophysics. She thought she had been engaged to construct a model of DNA as Wilkins was quite keen on the model-building approach. But she did not go ahead because Rosalind objected. The structure would not be solved that way, she said. As Cowan saw it, ‘She was a very forceful personality, Maurice was not. So I got involved with collagen.' Cowan also formed the impression that Randall was essentially collecting people without a clear idea of what they were doing.

Nobody at the Cavendish in Cambridge was working on DNA. Bragg's ban still held. What Pauling was up to at Caltech was unclear. The Cavendish, however, now had a Pauling on the premises. Peter Pauling, Linus's younger son, was one of two fresh young American faces in Room 103. The other was Jerry Donohue, a physical chemist and former graduate student of Pauling's.

As a family, the Paulings were as close-knit as the Franklins, and more effusive. The parents, Linus and Ava Helen, corresponded regularly and lovingly with their second son, who had arrived in Cambridge, with a supply of colour film and a set of the
International Tables for Crystallography,
to live at Peterhouse, the oldest Cambridge college, to do research with John Kendrew. Their letters were usually about practical matters, such as the kind of car to buy when the elder Paulings came to Europe or whether Peter should wear woollen underwear, but there was a strong undercurrent of scientific information throughout. Peter, about to turn twenty-two, was struggling with the difficulty of entering a field in which his father was a world giant.

‘Have you met Crick yet?' Linus wanted to know at the end of October. Indeed, Peter had, and liked Crick and Odile very much. They had a new baby and a picturesque small house called the Green Door in the heart of Cambridge and often invited Peter to Sunday lunch. Crick had edged into quasi-acceptance at Cambridge. The biologist Michael Swann had got him into Caius, as a member of the college, but not of the university; hence he could not wear a gown and was presumed to be a guest every time he exercised his dining rights.

Peter Pauling also became friendly with Watson, a young American like himself in pursuit of female company. He told his parents that he thought he would take French lessons, having learned from Jim Watson about a woman who had a house ‘full of French girls'. ‘No women in this town,' Peter explained. (So much for Newnham and Girton.) In his research, he was planning to use the new Cochran-Crick theory to determine the helical nature of protein molecules. He was also interested in the molecular structure of the myoglobin of sperm whales. ‘Stranded whales are the property of the Queen,' Peter wrote home, ‘but we have an agreement with her to get a piece of meat if one comes ashore.' In return, his father informed him that he and Corey had sent a paper to
Nature
proposing molecular structures for hair, horn and such substances, involving ‘a parallel aggregation of helices'.

 

By November everybody at King's knew that Rosalind was leaving. Gosling was shocked and saddened. He had not realised that things had got that bad. Also he would be deprived of his thesis supervisor, right in the middle of work that was proving productive and publishable. There was so much more to do. However, her date of departure for Birkbeck had been postponed from January because she had lost a month's work with flu. She hoped to finish up the Patterson work for the two papers to
Acta Cryst
she was preparing on her DNA discoveries.

Her as-yet-unpublished results were given to the members of the MRC's biophysics committee when, on 15 December, responding to Randall's invitation, they came for their day at King's. Some of them, particularly their chairman, Sir Edward Salisbury, were uneasy about what ‘Randall's Circus' was up to.

Like students preparing for the school's Open Day, each of the staff wrote up his and her current work; Rosalind no exception. She included the same information that was in her Turner and Newall report at the start of the year and handed it in to Randall who had it printed in advance, on 5 December. She gave the full dimensions of the unit cell, its length, width, and angles. She claimed to have established ‘with certainty' that the crystal fell into the space group called ‘face-centred monoclinic'. The results of a year's incomparable research, put like a gift in a box, for the MRC committee's holiday reading.

The committee came to King's at noon. First it was conducted by Randall around the new laboratories, then entertained to lunch. From two until four members were free to discuss with individual workers those parts of the research which interested them specially. Then they had tea (which had just come off the ration). The visit was judged a great success. The secretary of the MRC recorded that ‘Salisbury [Sir Edward Salisbury, the chairman] is now satisfied that Randall and his team are concentrating their energies upon important problems.' An example mentioned was the use of the interference microscope to measure the dry weights of living cells and their components. ‘This represented an important advance in quantitative cytochemistry, and it filled a need long felt by biologists.'

Clearly, King's work on the structure of DNA had not made a big impression.

The report circulated to the committee was not marked ‘Confidential', nor was it confidential. On the other hand, in the customary British manner in which everything official is considered secret until deliberately made public, the report was not expected to reach outside eyes.

 

While King's was priding itself on having passed its MRC test, Peter Pauling in Cambridge received big news from his father. Pauling wrote that he and Corey had worked out a structure for DNA. Peter immediately showed the letter to Watson and Crick. Watson was devastated. He and Crick had long feared that Pauling might crack the problem before they did.

Watson left Cambridge to go skiing in Zermatt with his sister over the holiday break, convinced that Pauling had triumphed. He stopped off in London to break the bad news to Maurice Wilkins. Wilkins countered with the good news that Rosalind would leave King's as soon as she finished writing up her work and would not be taking DNA with her. He could then get down to model-building in earnest.

End of term at King's brought the annual Biophysics dinner, but Rosalind understandably chose not to attend. On Christmas Eve, Randall left his office and went along Fleet Street and up Ludgate Hill to St Paul's Cathedral. He climbed the many steps only to find the building locked. Outraged, he shot off a scathing letter to the editor of
The Times,
giving his address as his club, the Athenaeum. The letter appeared on 30 December under the heading ‘Christmas at St Paul's':

 

Sir — There can be few village churches throughout the land whose doors do not remain open on Christmas Eve for prayer, carols, and meditation, and in many churches Christmas Day begins with a midnight service. Why does the great Cathedral Church of St Paul, set as it is in the heart of London, fail in its duty in this regard? As I approached the cathedral about 5.15 p.m. on Christmas Eve, a peal of bells died away: but instead of the doors being wide open to receive those who wished to enter they were locked and many went bewildered away under the mocking lights of a Christmas tree which denied the spirit of Christmas . . . Can not the Dean put his cathedral to better use at Christmas? No wonder the Church attracts such a small fraction of the public to within its doors at the one time of year when the Christian faith implies that they should have ever-open doors.