Rosalind Franklin (30 page)

With Klug, Finch and Holmes, and another research assistant, James Watt, subsidised by the National Coal Board, who worked with her on coal, she had a quasi-family. She proudly added to her curriculum vitae ‘Leader of ‘‘ARC Group'' at Birkbeck'. One of their unofficial functions was to act as buffers in her relationships with the rest of Birkbeck.

 

Buffers were needed. When Rosalind's technician, Bryon Wilson, told her he intended to take advantage of Birkbeck's scheme of offering staff a week off for education — he wanted to work towards an O-level certificate — she questioned his intellectual abilities in words that stung. When he persisted, she transferred him to her coal research assistant and ignored him after that. (Wilson eventually got a doctorate and became a lecturer in microbiology at St Mary's Hospital Medical School.)

The same qualities of abruptness, reserve and suspicion that had been noticed at King's College were noticed at Birkbeck too. Bernal's people saw themselves as a family into which Rosalind didn't fit. According to Wilson, ‘Everybody called her ‘‘Rosy'' behind her back. She didn't like it!' She tended to pass people on the staircase and not say hello. She did not come to tea in the lab as the rest did. Holmes, one of her great admirers, acknowledged, ‘She was not a great communicator.' He attributed it to her shyness. The clerk to the college, A.J. Caraffi, on the other hand, blamed her lack of academic status. This left her, Caraffi thought (although personally he saw her as a woman of wit and sparkle), with a feeling of ‘not quite belonging' to the staff.

She was notorious as a non-conversationalist. At lunch in the faculty dining room (where she had at first trouble gaining admittance because she was considered non-faculty or ‘external staff'), one day she plucked up courage to comment, ‘It's a fine year for mushrooms,' and lapsed into silence again.

She had an outright clash with Stan Lenton, the college's much-admired steward in charge of technical services. Lenton grew very irritated with the curt way in which Rosalind would ask for new equipment. Things came to a head when she ordered a massive transformer from Paris. The monster gadget turned up at a Customs freight department in south London. From long experience, Lenton knew the forms and procedures necessary to get things through Customs without being charged duty, but Rosalind declared she was ‘quite capable' of dealing with it herself. A week later she knocked on his door and acknowledged defeat. He solved the problem for her and, ‘We never looked back after that.'

One reason to hold herself aloof was that so many of Bernal's staff were extremely left-wing or even outright members of the Communist Party. The social divide between her and them was real. People at Birkbeck were aware that there was money behind her. As someone put it, ‘She lived in Kensington and she travelled.' One evening a big car drove up to 21 Torrington Square; from the back a woman in evening dress asked for Rosalind. The porter who went up to call her found her in her lab coat and was told she would be down in ten minutes. In exactly ten minutes, she emerged, elegant, transformed, and was driven away.

If Rosalind made much the same impression at Birkbeck as at King's, the great difference was that at Birkbeck, she was leader of a team doing superb work; she was neither isolated nor unappreciated nor unprotected. Bernal thought the world of her and saw that her firmness inspired those around her to reach the same high standard.

 

If she had lacked a collaborator at King's, she now had three, and in mid-1955 acquired a fourth. The American biophysicist Don Caspar, whom Watson knew at Caltech, held a PhD from Yale, with a thesis on TMV. In mid-1955 he left Caltech to spend a year at Cambridge as a postdoctoral fellow in molecular biology, and asked Rosalind (with many friendly references to ‘Jim') if he might work with her for a time. Rosalind replied that she was interested but had no funds and also had two new people to look after, but ‘if that doesn't put you off we shall be very glad to have you'.

Caspar was an ebullient twenty-seven. Having known Rosalind only through correspondence, when he finally met her in the summer of 1955, he was taken aback. He had expected a dour English bluestocking, ‘and she turned out to be an attractive vivacious young woman'. The ingredients for compatibility were there: Caspar was foreign, very bright, with a Jewish background and an intense preoccupation with their mutual special subject. He was unmarried and had a disarming friendliness. One day when he arrived to see her, Rosalind was outside on the steps, with Ken Holmes and James Watt. When the small moustached smiling figure hailed her, ‘Hey, Ros!' her companions waited for the explosion. There was none. Somehow the young American got away with it. ‘I had no hang-ups with her at all,' Caspar said, and was astonished that others did.

Caspar's work and Rosalind's meshed perfectly. At Yale he had discovered, as she had heard from Jim Watson when she was at Caltech, that the tobacco mosaic virus has a hole straight through the middle. The hole came as a surprise because the virus's centre had been thought to be full of the nucleic acid, RNA.

Rosalind was on her way to an answer to the related question: where is the RNA, if not in the central cavity? From her X-ray pictures which gave her better data than had been available to Caspar and Watson, she discovered that the RNA is deeply embedded between the protein subunits, winding around its inner groove like a twisting thread. She found also that the protein surface of the TMV is like a knobbly screw.

Summary of the first analysis of the structure of TMV shows the protein subunits ranged around the hole at the core, with the RNA embedded between the protein subunits, winding around its inner groove like a twisting thread. This diagram was published by Klug and Caspar in 1960.

 

Caspar was employing, just as Rosalind, Klug and Holmes had in their own research, the very new technique, developed by Max Perutz, of isomorphous replacement, or heavy atom substitution. That is, they introduced some atoms of a heavy element such as mercury or lead into the virus protein. The difference between the X-ray patterns produced by crystals of the molecules with and without the heavy atoms then reveals the structure. Revealingly, the graphs plotted by Caspar and Rosalind, when superimposed, showed the exact distance of the RNA from the centre of the virus.

This information was of more than abstract interest. Once the internal configuration of the virus was known, the way it works could be understood. The protein surrounds and isolates the nucleic acid (RNA) until the virus has infected a host cell. Once inside the cell, the RNA is released from the protein and begins generating new virus — the dreaded infective process.

 

Rosalind's work was fascinating but isolating. No one outside the field could understand it. When she gave her parents two simple books on viruses, she was disappointed when they said they couldn't understand them. Relief from the intense concentration on work came in various ways. In London she enjoyed the theatre and the cinema, and was a member of the National Film Theatre. As ever, she threw herself into her holidays abroad. In the summer of 1955 she made a return visit to Yugoslavia for a month, and then went on a cycling trip in Normandy with Anne Piper.

Wherever she was, she found tremendous pleasure in the children of her friends and relations. She was godmother to one of the children of her cousin Catherine (Joseph) Carr and regularly went for weekend visits to the Carr home on the Sussex Downs. Catherine had not only married ‘out' but further rebelled against her family by choosing a working-class man. Rosalind got along very well with her husband. She loved playing with the children and bringing them presents. To Catherine, her cousin was a single woman who should have married and had children of her own but who was too bright for most of the men she knew.

Another former school friend, Jean Kerlogue, often stayed at Rosalind's flat with her family. She was, like so many others, astonished by Rosalind's amazing ability to produce exactly the right toys and games for the children. Yet for Rosalind choosing good presents, like cooking well, was more than a matter of flair; she did it with the same kind of astute observation and eye for detail that she brought to her experiments.

Friends tried to introduce her to men. Evi Ellis, who had returned to London from Chicago, was married and living in Notting Hill. She arranged a dinner party to bring together Rosalind and Ralph Milliband of the London School of Economics. Milliband was impressed by Rosalind but nothing came of it. No wonder, perhaps, considering her pervasive unapproachability. Rosalind told Evi that a man who had a flat on the same floor of Donovan Court had asked her, going up in the lift one night, if she would like to come in for a drink. ‘She didn't seem to know why he had asked her,' Evi said.

Various of her married friends have reported hearing Rosalind maintain that women should not have both a career and children because it was unfair to the children. As the 1950s progressed, however, Rosalind saw among her close friends women who managed both very well. Anne Piper had four children and was an executive with the John Lewis Partnership; Mair Livingstone and Denise Luzzati were both doctors and mothers of two. Hearsay apart, however, there is no evidence that Rosalind ever made a deliberate decision to be a scientist rather than a wife. What seems more likely is that she was afraid of intimacy and could find it only in professional relationships or with married couples. Colin Franklin marvelled at Liebe Klug's tolerance of the closeness between Rosalind and Aaron. But it was no mystery to the Klugs, who long remembered the mechanical fish she brought from America for their small son. ‘She was a good aunt,' said Klug.

 

Once they had deciphered the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus, Rosalind and her team were ready to construct a model. As components, they needed, not the shining metal plates that stood for atoms in the Watson-Crick model of DNA, but something with a longer shape to represent the protuberant subunits of TMV. Bryon Wilson (at that point still working with Rosalind) thought that a bicycle handlebar grip might be about the right shape. As Birkbeck was not far from Oxford Street, he went down to Woolworth's and asked for some handlebar grips. How many? When Wilson replied ‘two gross [288]', the salesclerk called the manager. It could only be a lunatic who would ask for the shop's entire stock. Wilson got them in the end, the model, and many subsequent versions, was constructed and was much in demand for exhibitions.

Science in the days before the computer and the photocopier involved many tedious jobs. Another of Wilson's was to go to the mathematics library in Bedford Square and copy down by hand Bessel Function tables. The only handbook available in Birkbeck was in the library and could not be taken away, and Rosalind could hardly be expected to perform such drudgery. In the same spirit, the ARC acceded to Bernal's request for Rosalind to hire a ‘computer' — that is, someone to perform computations. It had no wish to have ‘Miss Franklin's time occupied on computations that could be done, as you suggest, by a girl of eighteen'. As the official rate for an 18-year-old girl in the ‘Machine Assistant' grade was five pounds a week, the ARC agreed, and a ‘girl' — a Mrs Cratchby — was hired at £350 a year.

 

Before long, Rosalind's group was working on a whole minestrone of plant viruses — potato, turnip, tomato and pea. Raiding the Birkbeck fridge, Caspar and Klug found crystals left from the 1930s by Bernal and Carlisle. Caspar took the Tomato Bushy Stunt and Klug the Turnip Yellow Mosaic. Rosalind, meanwhile, was scouring the world for virus samples. She asked a virologist at the University of Wisconsin for ten milligrams of Pea Streak. The most convenient form in which to send it, she recommended, was ‘a rather concentrated solution or an ultracentrifuge pellet'. She added that ‘Jim Watson (of the DNA model) is back in Cambridge, and is also interested in these things, and between us we want to look at as many viruses as possible.'

Watson was indeed back at the Cavendish, to spend the second half of 1955. He had a year's leave before starting his new post at Harvard as assistant professor of biology so that he might work with Crick on principles of viral structure. As Watson had shown an interest in the potato virus, Crick suggested that Rosalind let Jim know if she were intending to work on this herself. If so, he said (in a cooperative spirit not in evidence two years earlier over DNA), Jim would leave that virus to her to avoid unnecessary duplication.

 

Her team was complete, the work was going beautifully, the results were plentiful. But how long could they all stay together? The threat to her group began almost as soon as Rosalind realised how good it was. When Bernal saw Norman Pirie, just as the Agricultural Research Council replaced the Turner and Newall Fellowship as Rosalind's paymaster, Pirie was still fuming over Rosalind's paper on TMV's fixed length. Pirie's bad temper amused Bernal, who knew all the same that Bawden and Pirie were very influential with the ARC.