Rosalind Franklin (35 page)

Concerned with the personal futures of her young team as well as for the future of her research, she put enormous motherly effort into investigating sources of finance for them all. Cheering news came from the secretary of the Medical Research Council who thanked Sir Lawrence Bragg of the Royal Institution for letting him know how highly he thought of Miss Franklin's work. The MRC would consider supporting two of her students when the ARC money ran out.

New research material arrived for crystallographic analysis. The Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York sent her some rat liver nucleoprotein, frozen and stored in a thermos bottle, and carried across the Atlantic by Francis Crick. Rosalind, standing in a ‘cold room', packed the substance into capillary tubes for X-ray photographing later. At the same time, she was under pressure to build models of her tobacco mosaic and turnip yellow mosaic viruses; those planned for the Brussels World's Fair would be five feet high. Professor J.W. Moulder of the University of Chicago's microbiology department, who was in charge of the international science section at the fair, enthusiastically urged her to make them as large as possible for maximum visual effect. The models, he said, were to be a highlight of the general virus exhibit and had to be ready, with explanatory material understandable by the general public, by November.

NINETEEN
Clarity and Perfection

(May 1957-April 1958)

N
O ONE WHO SAW
R
OSALIND
in public in the summer season of 1957 would have guessed she was living under threat. Hiding any pain or weariness, she stood on her feet for long hours in evening dress, demonstrating and explaining her work at exhibitions. One week into cobalt therapy, she presented her models at the Royal Society's
conversazione
as part of a display on the application of X-ray analysis and electron microscopy to rod and spherical plant viruses. Her parents came and found her looking lovely, gay and happy. Three weeks later, on the evening of the day of her last cobalt treatment, she put on a red silk Chinese blouse for a Friday evening discourse at the Royal Institution - a pre-Victorian ritual at which an invited black-tie audience listens to a lecture, then strolls through displays in the library. Accompanying the talk — ‘Observations on the Architecture of Viruses' — by Robley Williams of the Virus Laboratory at Berkeley, were four exhibits: two by himself and Kenneth Smith, one by Crick and one by Franklin and Klug.

 

Francis Crick continued to be a friend and uncompromising critic. ‘Rash in the extreme' was his judgement on a Franklin—Holmes paper on the use of heavy atom substitution to determine the internal measurements of the tobacco virus. Listing his objections, Crick advised more research and warned of the dangers of publishing wrong information: ‘There is absolutely no urgency to publish a paper at the moment. Nothing is lost by postponing publication, whereas if you publish it and it turns out to be wrong your whole research programme will be discredited.'

No urgency, of course, unless you were dying. But that is not how Rosalind saw it. She wanted to submit the paper she and Ken Holmes had written, to
Acta Cryst.
She took Crick's comments to heart, as she undoubtedly did also those appended by Max Perutz whose wise observation applied to more than crystallography:

 

One so easily persuades oneself of the rightness of a dubious solution and then spends one's time in fruitless search of supporting evidence. As Francis has said, this is an occupational disease among protein crystallographers. It can be kept at bay only by frequent cold showers.

 

Don Caspar reappeared in her life. He was in Cambridge, with his mother, for the summer of 1957. Rosalind had got along extremely well with the widowed Mrs Caspar when they met the previous August in Colorado and their friendship resumed when Rosalind came to visit Francis and Odile Crick. In subsequent weeks, Rosalind had Mrs Caspar to stay at her London flat; one day, for mother and son, Rosalind organised one of her favourite treats — a picnic in Richmond Park.

As Rosalind's health seemed to improve, so did the outlook for her virus group. On 9 July she heard from an official at the US Public Health Service in Bethesda, Maryland, giving her informal notice that her research grant had been approved by the National Advisory Allergy and Infectious Diseases Council. J. Palmer Saunders sent the news ‘preliminarily,' he explained, ‘because of the unfortunate delay you have encountered previously'.

However, the news was not greeted with universal rejoicing at Birkbeck. There was a feeling that the American grant, £10,000 a year for each of three years, was too much: £10,000 was enough to be spread over three years rather than be paid as an annual sum.

 

Two conferences and a holiday in Europe in mid-summer: why not? Rosalind was feeling improved even though re-examination in July showed that the pelvic mass on the left side was still there and her parents asked for a second opinion. When the hospital advised that Rosalind remain near London just in case some intestinal obstruction should occur, she took the advice instead of her friend Dr Mair Livingstone, that there were doctors on the Continent should she need one. However, Rosalind was not oblivious to her condition; she told Livingstone that in the United States the previous summer she had met a man she might have loved, even married, but whom she had put out of her mind because of her illness.

She and Caspar attended a conference on polio in Geneva, where the star was Dr Jonas Salk, discoverer of the polio vaccine in 1953. Afterwards, with Caspar, his mother and Richard Franklin (no relation — rather a friend of Caspar's from Yale who owned a Volkswagen) she went to Zermatt. Mrs Caspar photographed the trio silhouetted against the great peak of the Matterhorn. Rosalind did not mention her illness, and seemed well, even if she did not have the strength she had had the previous summer in the Rockies. For her, the Alpine excursion in the company of a close friend was the highlight of her summer: ‘a glorious weekend in Zermatt', as she summed it up for Anne Sayre.

Leaving Geneva, she attended a protein conference in Paris, then embarked on a long driving tour through northern Italy, with her sister Jenifer and a friend. She would have preferred something more rugged:

 

This was my first continental holiday by car, and confirmed my suspicion that cars are undesirable on holiday. Italy was wonderful, as always — the Dolomites, Verona, Ravenna, Pistoia, Lucca, a delightful day with the Luzzati family near Viareggio and the sea at Portovenere. But travelling around in a little tin box isolates one from the people and the atmosphere of the place in a way that I have never experienced before. I found myself eyeing with envy all rucksacks and tents.

 

She was in no way an invalid on the trip, made in Jenifer's Morris Minor which had been flown across the Channel in the primitive air-lift operating from Lydd on the Kent coast. And her good humour made a strong impression on Luzzati's mother, who was convinced that any woman scientist would look and behave like a suffragette. She was surprised and pleased, he recalled, to find out how attractive and easy-going Rosalind was.

 

Polio was her new interest. In mid-1957 she began to study the virus — rather, to try to. It was spherical, morphologically close to the turnip yellow mosaic virus. When two scientists at Berkeley offered to supply her with polio crystals, she wrote to ask Bernal's permission. He, in turn, sought the Master's: ‘In view of the extremely small amounts of infective material with which she will be dealing, and the very careful precautions she will be taking, there could be no objection to the research being carried out.'

Bernal's plea was thwarted, not by his usual adversary, the Master, Dr J.F. Lockwood, but by the staff. Some felt that Birkbeck was so old and filthy that if it were cleaned up it would fall down — hardly premises in which to store a dangerous material. The physicist Werner Ehrenberg was particularly alarmed, as he himself had been crippled by polio. At one point, Rosalind stored the crystals in her parents' refrigerator. As she put them in a thermos flask, she said to her mother, ‘You'll never guess what's in there. Live polio virus.'

In time, the virus was housed at the nearby London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. From the School, Professor E.T.C. Spooner commiserated with Bernal in having failed to dispel ‘the fears of some of your people; the magic word ‘‘poliomyelitis'' has such a terrific emotional build-up at present that one cannot expect normal critical faculties to work':

 

I am myself quite sure, as I think you are, that the risk associated with Dr Franklin's proposed work is quite negligible, smaller probably than that which anyone takes who subjects himself to any kind of injection, for instance. Of course there is a risk; as there is that a house will burn down, or that a meal in a restaurant will give you botulism; or there is the far greater risk of walking across a road. But that is not the point; and I doubt if anything I can say will alter the position. However, I do hope it will be possible for Dr Franklin to do this work. To have to confess to our American friends (who already laugh at our timidity over the polio vaccine) that it cannot be done because of the risk that the tube might break would, in my view, be extremely humiliating.

We in my department will gladly do anything we can to help.

 

With the virus safely housed, Rosalind took it for X-raying to the Royal Institution. Klug and Finch, who were working with her, chose to take the vaccine, but Rosalind decided against it. Her decision has been interpreted as fatalistic courage; as she already had a terrible disease, she could risk another. It seems more likely, however, that Rosalind, rather than manifesting an indifference to survival, was as conscious as was Professor Spooner of the low probability of an accident. She knew that she was not going to drop or break the test tubes. Proudly she added a new title to her curriculum vitae: ‘From Oct 57 Project Director of a US Public Health Service grant for research in molecular structure of viruses by X-ray diffraction.'

 

By November, the lull was over. Her stomach had swelled up again, she told Anne Piper over the telephone, and she needed to have it drained. It seems to have been at that point that she became a patient at the Royal Marsden Hospital, just around the corner from her flat in Drayton Gardens. Her admission to the Marsden, an institution specialising in cancer treatment, was the first evidence her staff had of what her illness really was. At the Marsden, she was one of the first to receive chemotherapy. Alice Franklin, her aunt who lived very near, marvelled at her courage, also her faith, each time, that the latest treatment would hold the disease in check until a cure could be found. In a rare willingness to talk about her work with her family, she offered to show her Aunt Alice some of her drawings and diagrams.

Rosalind liked her doctors at the Marsden, especially her case supervisor, the well-known Dr David Galton of the Chester Beatty Institute, part of the Institute of Cancer Research, who would sit and talk with her and in whom she had utmost confidence. With her radiotherapist too, she had good rapport, asking questions and getting intelligent answers.

Visitors to her room in Granard House, the Marsden's private wing, found her in a wine-coloured dressing gown, taking radioactive liquid gold in a tilting bed, with a television set in her room, and Jenifer or one of her brothers usually at her bedside. Nannie came to see her. After a week, however, she was still in pain.

Into her room one day walked Peggy Clark, who had read science with her at Newnham. Peggy was now, under her married name of Dyche, a medical physicist on the Marsden staff. She had seen a parcel addressed to Dr Rosalind Franklin and wondered if it was her old college friend. Not having seen Rosalind since Paris, Peggy found her looking reasonably fit and cheerful. Rosalind was happy to talk; she complained about the incompetence of the doctors at University College Hospital and spoke of her hope that the chemotherapy would be successful. She described with pride her virus model to be exhibited at the Brussels World's Fair. In subsequent days, when she got out of bed, Rosalind would occasionally wander into the hospital laboratory to chat with Peggy and other staff about the radioisotopes they were dispensing.

In and out of hospital at the end of 1957 and the beginning of 1958, when not well enough to live by herself in her flat, Rosalind stayed with her brother Roland and his wife Nina at their home on Aylmer Road in East Finchley. She listed Roland as ‘next of kin' on her hospital admission form. Her mother would ask, ‘Why are you going to Nina's?' but the rest of her family understood. Rosalind positively enjoyed staying with Roland and his wife, who had several small and lively children. Her room was ready and her bed warmed for her whenever she wanted to come; she could rest when she wished, and otherwise play with her nieces and nephews. In Roland's view, his mother was over-solicitous and his father seemed unable to cope: ‘I think she just felt more comfortable in our house. We never discussed her illness. It's not a confiding sort of family; we were very private and we would not share emotions or thoughts or anything with each other at all.'

Perhaps not, but her brothers, as so often before, were emotional props. She did have her dark moods: the thought of dying with her work unfinished made her furious and depressed; she would ring Colin or Roland in the middle of the night if she needed to talk. All three brothers were named as executors when, on 2 December 1957, she made her will. None of her relations were named as beneficiaries of her modest estate — not surprising, in an affluent family whose financial affairs were well-organised. Instead, she chose Aaron Klug as her principal beneficiary, to receive £3,000, plus her Austin car. Next on her list were two close women friends who had children to support: for Dr Mair Livingstone, £2,000; for Anne Piper, £1,000. Last, ‘my old Nurse Miss Griffiths' was to have £250. The residue of the estate was to be distributed by the executors to charities ‘of which they think I would have approved'.

The sums involved were not small at the time to people without savings or capital. The legacy to Aaron Klug, as seen by his friend, Dan Jacobson, was a brilliant and sensitive stroke. Jacobson imagined Rosalind saying to herself, ‘What does Aaron need?' She knew that the Klugs, with a small son, were very short of money and that he was considering going back to South Africa. Her gift was thus well in the Franklin family tradition of enlightened philanthropy.

 

Still in hospital over Christmas, she laughed when some worthy ladies made knitted presents for the patients, and hers turned out to be a pullover with no hole for the head. She was not
that
ill, she joked. By early January 1958 she felt well enough to go on an outing with her cousin Ursula. Rosalind said she wanted some French food so Ursula drove her to a good restaurant in Richmond; she also enjoyed a walk in the park. Later she described the day out in a letter in French to Adrienne Weill, with the vividness
(‘La journée de hier a été magnifique')
she had put in her holiday letters about her Alpine adventures. Indeed, she felt so well after her excursion, she said, that it seemed ridiculous to return to the hospital to play the invalid. She decided to negotiate her release, continue the treatment as an outpatient and begin making appearances at the lab. From then on, she said, she would, little by little, return to normal life.