Rosalind Franklin (34 page)

EIGHTEEN
Private Health, Public Health

(September 1956-May 1957).

B
EFORE HER OPERATION
, Rosalind gave consent for a hysterectomy if one were necessary. She knew that she might be signing away her chance to have children and noted wryly that she had been put in the Obstetrical Hospital. Perhaps when her brother David came to collect her, he might think she had had a miscarriage or an abortion. When she emerged from the anaesthetic, however, she was relieved to hear that her womb was still there and a part of one ovary. But not for long.

Almost exactly a month later she was back in University College Hospital (this time as a private patient) for a second operation — ostensibly for an infection, actually for a hysterectomy and removal of remnants of the left ovary. This was done and no further cancer was found.

Anne Sayre, who was staying in Rosalind's flat, answered the telephone one day, to hear Jacques Mering calling from Paris. He was startled that Rosalind was not there, and upset to learn that she had undergone further surgery. As Anne struggled to explain in French, Mering became very agitated. Later, when Rosalind learned of the call, she too became very emotional, then confessed she had been very much in love with Mering.
⁶
She gave no details but Anne gathered that it was a matter of deep feeling on Rosalind's part and a source of unhappiness, because - so Anne believed - Rosalind was incapable of any prolonged happy extra-marital relationship. Yet Anne, who knew Mering from Paris, recognised that he combined intellectual strength with ‘a truly immense personal attractiveness and a European attitude and psychology'. Anne was aware too that, since Rosalind had left Paris, she and Mering had seen each other several times a year, and corresponded. (Mering later destroyed Rosalind's letters.)

If Rosalind knew that ovarian cancer is called ‘the silent killer' because it is often well advanced by the time it is diagnosed, she put the thought aside. She was optimistic. Cancer had been found, she understood, but in a contained form that surgery had removed. Convalescing at her parents' home in north London, she loaned 22 Donovan Court to another friend, Anne Sayre having returned to America. ‘Use my flat,' Rosalind said to Jean Kerlogue, saying she was recovering from ‘just a little operation'. But Alice Franklin, Rosalind's aunt and neighbour from whom Jean got the key, indicated that the condition was more serious than Rosalind let on.

Rosalind was still staying with her parents when she wrote to Anne to tell her to stop worrying:

 

everything is going very well, and I expect to be fully back to normal some time next month. I've been out of hospital a week, and from here I manage to keep in touch with what is going on in the lab and even to catch up a bit on writing things up. My mother really seems to have understood that I not only don't mind being left alone at times but positively like it, so things are a lot easier than last time. Next week I'm going again to Cambridge to stay with the Cricks — it's really rather hard on relatives and friends who offer to take charge of my convalescence to have to put up with me twice in a month, but I've promised them I won't do it a third time. After Cambridge I shall probably stay a bit with a brother or two before going back to Donovan Court.

 

At home, she was silent for long periods. Her parents were not surprised; they were accustomed to her uncommunicativeness. She would sit with her knitting or sewing, then suddenly say, ‘I think it is my bedtime,' and take herself away at an early hour. Ellis and Muriel sensed that, in fact, she was getting very little sleep. As soon as she could, she moved out, saying she was sorry she had not been better company.

The emotional distance between mother and daughter, so long filled by Nannie, had left Muriel and Rosalind without that shared understanding many mothers and daughters carry throughout their lives. Muriel used to weep and get terribly upset if Rosalind did not eat her lunch or take a rest. Rosalind's reaction to undisguised maternal anxiety was to retreat to others who did not try to stop her doing as she wished.

 

The Cricks certainly did not fuss. Francis Crick never asked the nature of her trouble; he told a woman scientist who inquired that he thought it was something ‘female'. The scientist was Dorothea Raacke, an American marine biologist and friend of Crick's. Raacke first met Rosalind in Cambridge, at Crick's table in The Eagle, and asked her how she liked to be known. ‘I'm afraid it will have to be Rosalind,' was the reply, pronounced in two quick syllables; then, with eyes flashing, ‘Most definitely
not
Rosy.'

‘There was, thought Raacke, with the Shakespearean and operatic Rosalinds in mind, ‘nothing at all romantic about her despite her beauty'. Raacke observed that Rosalind was more timorous and less assured than her assertive reputation suggested, and that she relied heavily on Crick for advice and encouragement. Raacke sympathised. From her own experience, she saw that women had a difficult time in academic life, particularly in science, and accepted it as given that in science a woman was judged and criticised much more harshly than a man and got less acknowledgement for work well done.

The two women became good friends and Raacke stayed many weekends at Rosalind's London flat. The topic of men was one Raacke felt she could not broach. Herself engaged to be married, she was longing to ask Rosalind if she had ever faced the conflict between marriage and her ambitions. But the wall of reserve was too strong. Nor did they discuss her illness. It was nearly a year before Rosalind confided that she had had a hysterectomy.

 

Rosalind was staying with the Cricks during the Suez Crisis of October—November 1956. Britain, France and Israel were embarked on the futile attempt to seize back the Canal Zone nationalised in the summer by the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser in protest against the decision of the United States and Britain to abandon their promise to finance Egypt's construction of the Aswan High Dam. Thus preoccupied, the major Western allies did little to help the Hungarian rebels who had risen up against Communist rule. Stalinism had begun to crumble eight months earlier when Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the twentieth congress of the Communist Party; his speech set off a wave of unrest in the satellite countries of Eastern Europe. When this dissent led to an armed uprising in Hungary, Soviet troops and tanks moved in and took control — an invasion that might not have been attempted but for the Suez diversion of Western attention.

Returning to Birkbeck, Rosalind watched with wry amusement the consternation of the college's many Communists at the Soviet Union's brutal action. ‘Reactions in Birkbeck to Hungarian things were quite interesting,' she wrote Anne Sayre; ‘nearly all the Party members were quite shaken, though I don't know any who left the Party.' Bernal, she observed, was fairly rattled, and on the rare occasions she heard him refer to the event, he got ‘emotional and confused', but soon ‘was again talking in the old Party cliches'.

As she had planned, she bought a car — a two-door grey Austin. For her colleagues, this was another quiet sign of the income gap between her and the rest. If they owned a car at all, and very few did, they had old models whose parts they were constantly tinkering with in the Birkbeck workshop. Rosalind's car was new.

In 1956 cancer was not a word freely uttered. Obituaries spoke delicately of people dying ‘after a long illness'. Rosalind's team did not know what had been wrong with her, simply that she seemed restored to health. From Harvard, Jim Watson wrote Aaron Klug, ‘I have heard rumours that Rosalind was not well. I hope she recovers soon,' and asked him to give her his wishes for a speedy return to health.

Her colleagues were glad to have her back. They were working on the comparison of plant viruses, with the amicable cooperation of Maurice Wilkins. Wilkins penned a note to ‘those in charge of cold rooms & fridges' at King's College: ‘Please give Dr Klug every assistance so that he may search for a bottle of TYMV [turnip yellow mosaic virus] which we wish him to have.'

 

With her formidable control over intrusive emotion, Rosalind's main concern was the future financing of her research group. She had developed a well-knit and loyal team but time was running out on their support. Sir William Slater had let it be known that funds from the Agricultural Research Council were unlikely to continue beyond the end of April 1957. There was no more in sight from any other British source. A month back at work, Rosalind submitted a clear, well-thought-out application to the Public Health Service of the US National Institutes of Health. Formally explaining her reasons for seeking help from abroad, she spelled out that her British grant had been decreased, that the collaboration between herself and Dr Aaron Klug was proving fruitful, and that the well-balanced research team they had built up should be allowed to continue for at least five years. Their project, moreover, was unusually international in character.

Under ‘Significance of this research', she summarised three years' investigation into the combination of ribonucleic acid (RNA) and protein:

 

Recent work has shown that there is a close similarity between the small RNA-containing viruses such as poliomyelitis and the ‘spherical' plant viruses with which our work is largely concerned. Moreover preliminary work on cytoplasmic nucleoprotein particles from various sources indicates some degree of structural resemblance between these and the small viruses.

 

The information into the internal structure of viruses gained by X-ray diffraction studies, she emphasised, could not be obtained by any other available technique. Accordingly, she requested $28,345 for the year beginning 1 October 1957 — roughly £10,000.

Illness pushed to the back of her mind, anxious about the unsettled future of her research group, she ended a difficult year with a trip to Paris, then to Strasbourg to see the Luzzatis, now the parents of two small children. Rosalind was amused to watch the children watching her: ‘The thing that impressed Anne (the eldest) most about me was that I ate an egg for breakfast — she was convinced that I'd made a mistake about the time of day.' During the visit, which included a walk in the Black Forest, Rosalind never spoke of the nature of her illness. She was back in the lab by 9 January.

 

Ever her booster, Bernal wrote to the ARC's chairman, Lord Rothschild, pointing out the great progress Rosalind's group had made:

 

The results which are beginning to show the precise relation of nucleic acid to the protein component are just now at the very centre of interest of biological structure analysis and are already beginning to tie up with the structure of such components as microsomes and chromosomes.

 

Rothschild, replied to ‘Dear Sage', signing himself ‘Victor', that arrangements would be made for Miss Franklin which he hoped would be satisfactory.

 

For the few months of 1957, Rosalind regretted that she had energy for working half-days only. Even so, she went into to the lab every day, preparing her specimens, drying her gels, turning them into crystals for the X-ray camera, comparing the evidence from different varieties. The papers poured out. She had published seven in 1956; six were on their way in 1957, mainly about viruses and co-authored with her colleagues, Aaron Klug, Ken Holmes and John Finch. An exception, which appeared in
Nature,
concerned oxidation in carbon and was written with her doctoral student, James Watt. An important long article on the turnip yellow mosaic virus, signed by Franklin, Klug and Finch, had been intended for
Nature,
but, at Crick's suggestion, sent instead to
Biochimica et Biophysica Acta.
‘I feel in the long run,' Crick said, ‘it does people more harm than good to publish too much in
Nature.'
(A condensed version of the paper was sent to
Nature
anyway.)

At intervals, Rosalind went back to University College Hospital for a checkup. On 20 February, a follow-up examination reported that she was feeling well generally, although hot flushes through the night prevented her sleeping. Confidently Klug wrote to a biochemist in Kansas, ‘Rosalind Franklin is well again and back in the laboratory.' From what Klug could see, ‘She looked okay.'

Nothing had been heard from the US Public Health Service when, in mid-April, the Agricultural Research Council (true to Rothschild's word) renewed its grant — but for only one more year. This was to be the
final
— underlined
final
— year: £4,300, to end in March 1958. After that, the ARC hoped that American sources would provide support. In a frosty coda, the council's governing committee observed that it was ‘inappropriate' for a worker of Miss Franklin's seniority to be carried on an annual grant. They were concerned at the absence of any steps, apart from the application for American funds, to establish the research on a more permanent basis. Miss Franklin, they felt, should either seek a post in a university or a research institute. They understood that she was not willing to do so.

Or able. The illusion of normalcy was shattered at the end of April when Rosalind was readmitted for two days to University College Hospital, very distressed, with profuse bleeding from the rectum. Two weeks later she was back in hospital, complaining of abdominal pain. An examination revealed a new mass on the left side of the pelvis. With the endless rounds of internal explorations, investigative enemas, palpating, probing and discussing, a very private woman was private no longer.

Rosalind asked her surgeon for an honest prognosis, and he gave it — frank and discouraging. He urged her to seek the comforts of religion and be grateful that she had time to prepare her soul. She was furious — with him, for despair; with science, for not yet having discovered a way to halt the progress of her disease until a cure could be found. She chose to remain hopeful; her new treatment was to be cobalt radiotherapy. Starting in mid-May, she disappeared from the lab from time to time and returned. True to form, she never told anyone where she was going.