Rosalind Franklin (25 page)

Part Three

FOURTEEN
The Acid Next Door

(March-December 1953)

I
N MOVING TO
Birkbeck College in Bloomsbury, Rosalind was, as she said, moving ‘from a palace to a slum', but it was a slum teeming with interest. The world-renowned crystallographer J.D. Bernal, the head of the physics department, appreciated that she was a brilliant experimentalist. He was eager, as he told his administrative superiors, ‘to get her assistance in a new attack on problems of virus structure, for which we have particular experience and facilities here'.

There were no ‘hooded crows' at left-wing non-sectarian Birkbeck. The college was founded in 1823 as the ‘London Mechanics' Institution' in much the same spirit as Ellis Franklin's ‘Working Men's College': to offer evening education to craftsmen and small employers ‘in the principles of the arts they practised and in the various branches of science and useful knowledge'. It became Birkbeck in 1907 and a full college of the University of London in 1920. Located in Bream's Buildings near Chancery Lane, the college held all its classes at night; a condition of admittance was that the student be engaged in full-time day employment.

The college barely survived the rupture of the war. In 1951 a dreary new modern block on Malet Street replaced a building lost during the war, adding to the University of London's architectural desecration of Georgian Bloomsbury. For the rest, Birkbeck operated in scrappy makeshift accommodation, with its science done under appalling conditions. Crystallography teaching and research were done nearby at 21,22 and 32 Torrington Square, in bomb-damaged red-brick eighteenth-century houses more suitable for film sets than laboratories. Within the
Upstairs, Downstairs
interior, scientists worked on structures of viruses and searched for life forms in meteorites. Outside, a descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson's ‘Old Lamplighter' came on a bicycle at dusk with a burning rag on the end of a long pole to ignite the gas lamps, returning in the morning to put them out.

Rosalind's office was on the fifth floor in what used to be a maid's room, reached by a narrow staircase leading up from the main floors below. The X-ray equipment was in the basement, the former kitchen, where the ceiling leaked. She had to hold an umbrella over her head while setting up her equipment.

 

John Desmond Bernal was so much a legend in his lifetime that he lived comfortably with the nickname he had acquired as a Cambridge undergraduate, ‘Sage'. He knew, and everybody knew he knew, everything. He was equally at ease in French and
Finnegans Wake.
His omniscience inspired many stories. It is said that when the
New Statesman,
preparing a profile, asked Bernal to name a subject with which he was unfamiliar, he suggested ‘eighth-century Roumanian churches'. A few days later he asked if he might amend that to ‘sixth-century Roumanian churches'. In C.P. Snow's Cambridge novel
The Search,
Constantine, a scientist modelled on Bernal, is shown walking home from a meeting of the Chemical Society, discoursing on the Cretan Renaissance and Chinese economics in the Tang dynasty.

Bernal's background was as eclectic as his interests. Born in Ireland to a Sephardic Jewish father of Catholic faith and an American Presbyterian mother who converted to Catholicism and who spoke French to him as a boy, Bernal was educated by the Jesuits. Moving on to Cambridge he became a scientist and a Marxist. His field was crystallography and he taught, among others, Max Perutz, Maurice Wilkins and Dorothy Hodgkin. During the Second World War he was scientific adviser to Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations. Mountbatten much admired him, Communist affiliation notwithstanding, and took him to the Quebec Conference in August 1943 to help plan the D-Day landings. Bernal was helped in choosing the landing beaches by the Anglo-Norman poem, ‘Roman de Rou' about the escape of Duke William (not yet the Conqueror). This provided old Norman place names which, when studied, revealed a silted-up harbour. For his patriotic service to the Allies, in 1947 Bernal was awarded the US Medal of Freedom. Further American honours and indeed an American visa were denied him after 1949 when he became vice-president of the World Peace Committee, making frequent trips to Eastern Europe. In 1951 he founded Scientists for Peace, the forerunner of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In 1953, just as Rosalind joined his lab, Bernal eulogised Stalin in an obituary, called him ‘a great scientist' as well as ‘the greatest figure of contemporary history'.

Bernal had left Cambridge before the war and accepted the chair of physics at Birkbeck in 1937; he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society the same year. At Birkbeck he introduced the use of crystallography to study plant viruses and very large molecules with molecular weights of millions, (hydrogen having a molecular weight of two; oxygen, thirty-two.) Trying to revive this work after the war, he set up the Biomolecular Research Laboratory, opened in 1948, to resume the study of virus structure abandoned at the beginning of the war. He wrung a grant of £61,100 from the Nuffield Foundation for biomolecular research. Birkbeck contributed a smaller sum. It took over the funding in 1952 and tucked the work into its physics department, where Werner Ehrenberg and Walter Spear developed the high-intensity X-ray tube that enabled Rosalind at King's to photograph her single DNA fibres.

Bernal wanted a separate department of crystallography but was blocked by the Master of Birkbeck, John F. Lockwood. Their uneasy relationship was to plague Bernal, and by extension, Rosalind, during her Birkbeck years. Lockwood felt that the physics department (thanks to Bernal's fame) was ‘becoming unbalanced'.

At fifty-two, Bernal's passions were crystallography, women and the Soviet Union. He attracted a stream of celebrities with left-wing political views to his flat at the top of 22 Torrington Square. The most celebrated, both of whom came in 1950, were Pablo Picasso (who left a large wall drawing behind) and the singer Paul Robeson, who sang — an event commemorated in a plaque that, like the Picasso drawing, adorns the college's drab concrete.

Success as a Don Juan was part of the Bernal legend. Far from handsome, he had an unruly shock of hair and terrible teeth, but a roguish smile, dazzling intellect and a fascinating stream of talk accompanied by an intent gaze on his quarry. His endless conquests were bolstered by an ideological commitment to sexual freedom, tolerated by his wife, whom he married when he was twenty-one and still at Cambridge, and by the two mistresses by whom he also had children. His reputation gave rise to many Bernal jokes: (Q: Why are there so many women in crystallography? A: Because Bernal was a crystallographer.) Another arose from Bernal's long collaboration in the 1930s with the American scientist Isidore Fankuchen. The faithful Mrs Fankuchen, so the story goes, was so amused by Bernal's scorecard that she started a society, ‘Women Who Have Not Been to Bed with Bernal.' She was president and Bernal's secretary, Anita Rimel, was treasurer. One day after the Fankuchens had returned to Brooklyn, Mrs Fankuchen is said to have received a telegram saying ‘You are now President AND Treasurer of the Society.'

The great Dorothy Hodgkin was more than a conquest: her long affair with Bernal began about 1934 after she had left Cambridge. Between 1933 and 1936 they produced twelve joint crystallographic papers.

Bernal encouraged contacts with the Soviet Union and influenced
Acta Crystallographica
to print its instructions to authors in Russian as well as English, in the hope of eliciting papers from the other side of the Iron Curtain (as he did not call it). He remained well-connected, at the same time, with the British Secret Service. One of his recruits to the staff, Dr John Mason, was asked to keep an eye on Bernal by New Scotland Yard, which he did. Yet if Mason ever reported anything to MI5, Bernal knew about it the next day.

Rosalind stayed aloof from Bernal's politics. Nor was she drawn into his amorous activities, because, said one of her staff, ‘she never gave him the slightest encouragement'. Part of his brilliance was attracting brilliance — the reason why Francis Crick had tried to work with him after the war. Bernal was also good at mobilising research grants and at delegating. He set up a number of very good research groups at Birkbeck and left them to themselves, while he travelled the world. For Rosalind Bernal was an understanding and supportive boss. Having directed her to a tough new subject, he let her read into it and otherwise left her alone. He told the college that while Miss Franklin was already constructing special apparatus for crystallographic research on viruses, ‘It is now clear, however, that she cannot expect to start effective observations until the autumn.' She was therefore free to continue to interpret the X-ray diagrams of DNA and their Patterson functions.

Much of her first months was spent in meetings with Gosling. Laughing in defiance of Randall's ban, they worked on their joint papers and discussed his thesis. Perforce she remained ‘in an intellectual sense' (Randall's phrase) part of King's laboratory, for Gosling had not been given another thesis adviser. For this service Gosling rewarded her with an effusive solo acknowledgement in his introduction to the thesis. Ignoring the work he had done with Wilkins and Stokes, Gosling wrote: ‘I am deeply indebted to Dr R.E. Franklin, who has introduced me to the techniques of X-ray crystallography and with whom I have worked most closely throughout this investigation.'

Rosalind laughed off Randall's letter telling her to stop thinking about the nucleic acids as ‘Just the sort of thing they do there.' She could hardly stop thinking about the nucleic acids. Ribonucleic acid (RNA) was an important ingredient of the tobacco mosaic virus to which Bernal was directing her.

RNA was the acid next door, a second form of the nucleic acid found in every cell. It is like DNA except for having one more oxygen atom attached to each of its sugars. Jim Watson said of his own useful research in 1952, when Sir Lawrence Bragg had ordered him off DNA, ‘I had decided to mark time by working on tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). A vital component of TMV was nucleic acid, and so it was the perfect front to mask my continued interest in DNA.'

Rosalind needed no front. All the work she and Gosling had done with the fiddly Beevers—Lipson strips had not been wasted. In addition to the two major manuscripts sent to
Acta Cryst,
which had been accepted for September but needed adjustments, they composed a second note for
Nature
that spring, giving their evidence for ‘a two-strand helical molecule of the Structure A form of DNA' and saying that it was ‘based mainly on a study of the cylindrically symmetrical Patterson function of Structure A'. The note appeared on 25 July, and confirmed the Watson-Crick proposal in principal but not on ‘points of detail'.

 

Rosalind was always eager for invitations to speak, especially abroad. She liked always to have two speaking engagements in her diary, to reassure herself - she told a friend - against the day ‘when it is all over'. That day seemed hardly imminent. In April she went to Aachen to read a paper on ‘The Mechanism of Crystallite Growth in Carbons' (later published in German) and in June to Paris, to read a short paper on ‘Le role de l'eau dans l'acide graphitique'. This paper was full of plural references to work done with her old mentor, Jacques Mering: ‘Nous avons étudié les diagrammes de rayons X', ‘nous déduisons' and ‘A partir de nos résultats' but, as before, only her name appeared on it when it was published. While in Paris, she was invited to do some work: ‘So I've been back to the old lab, with the same people and same apparatus — all very pleasant.' Among the French treats she brought back to London from her satisfying journey was a curved piece of quartz crystal to make a focused X-ray beam.

(Her hospitable bent moved her to loan her flat whenever possible. During her frequent travels, she kept 22 Donovan Court full of friends passing through London and, on one occasion, when a London friend found herself temporarily without accommodation after having a baby, Rosalind moved out and installed mother, grandmother and infant in the flat, which she had stocked with a cot and nappies.)

 

In the spring of 1953 Rosalind could not have dreamed what Watson, Crick and Wilkins would be saying from platforms in the twenty-first century — that her contribution was critical to the discovery of the double helix of DNA. With no idea that her data had been used, she had no sense of having been overtaken in a race which the Cavendish had won. Rather, Watson and Crick were now her collaborators, on the way to becoming her friends. In any event, she did not accept their DNA structure as more than a hypothesis. She referred to it as ‘the Watson-Crick model' and in the second of her
Acta Cryst
papers, both of which appeared in September, she wrote that ‘discrepancies prevent us from accepting it in detail'.

While her
Acta
papers were in the press in the spring and summer of 1953, she sent copies to Watson for his comments and received a reply from Crick, saying that as Jim had left for the States, he would answer instead. Addressing her as ‘Miss Franklin' (the correct form for writing to a female colleague; a man would have been addressed as ‘Franklin'), Crick asked — as if their own historic letter to
Nature
had not settled the matter — whether the phosphates in DNA really must be accessible (i.e., on the outside); whether calf thymus was the only source to yield Structure A and what fibres gave only Structure B? About her second paper, he wondered whether the unit cell was
‘truly
face-centred monoclinic, and not really triclinic, with two angles 90\167/'. The point was important, he said, ‘because if the unit cell is
strictly
C2, one must have the DNA chains in pairs, running in opposite directions'.

Rosalind's paper does indeed say ‘C2 is the only space group possible'. This shows that, even though she had missed its antiparallel implications, she understood very well what the space group C2 was. It is a puzzle why Watson and Crick, considering the information so crucial to their discovery, had not mentioned the fact in their two
Nature
papers of 1953. Nor did they mention the space group by name in the much longer, more detailed paper on the DNA structure that appeared in the
Proceedings of the Royal Society
the following year. This omission, viewed half a century later, remains inexplicable.