Rosalind Franklin (15 page)

The biophysics unit at King's could be seen as another form of reward from a grateful nation. Randall wished, post-war, to apply the techniques of physics to large molecules of biological importance. Endorsement for the unit's formation came from the Royal Society, but the actual money was provided by the Medical Research Council. The MRC, which was to loom large in his life, encouraged him to move down from remote St Andrews to the livelier environment of King's College London, where he set about gathering his staff. For his project, the MRC gave him £22,000 — a generous nest-egg much resented by some others in other King's departments, struggling under limited budgets.

One of Randall's first recruits was Maurice Wilkins, a Cambridge graduate, who had been with him at St Andrews and Birmingham. Wilkins had spent much of the war in Berkeley, California at the Livermore Laboratory, working on the Manhattan Project. After the war, he read Schro dinger's
What Is Life?
and moved his interest to the molecules controlling living processes. For Wilkins the shift to biophysics was a change from a dry science to a wet one. When he recoiled from one of Randall's experiments — cooling horse blood in liquid air to obtain an absorption spectrum — Randall reminded him that the great Michael Faraday had once put a beef steak between the poles of his magnet.

At the only physics department in Britain to have a major research interest in biophysics, Randall and Wilkins were the king and crown prince, but Randall wore a triple crown. He was at one and the same time: Wheatstone Professor of Physics, head of the physics department, and honorary director of the Medical Research Council biophysics research unit within the physics department. Randall was good — shockingly good, some felt — at snaring people on all sorts of grants and fellowships, which got his motley assembly of talent the name ‘Randall's Circus'. He was less good at delineating their responsibilities once he got them. He preferred to communicate by notes on pink or white paper, and he was manipulative, not above playing people off against each other.

A bit of a showman, he wore dandyish American-made suits, a bow tie and a fresh flower in his buttonhole every day and cherished a rubber plant kept in his office. (It was suggested that his interest in applying physics to biology derived from the love of plants acquired in his father's nursery.) At the same time, he was, in Wilkins's view, ‘tough as old leather — a Napoleon who sat at a big desk and liked to see people falter as they approached it'.

Randall was unusual for his time for the prominence he gave to women scientists. When Rosalind came to King's, eight out of thirty-one of the biophysics staff were women, several in quite high positions. Dr Honor Fell (later Dame) was Senior Biological Adviser to the unit, coming once a week from Cambridge where she was director of the Strangeways Laboratory. Dr Jean Hanson (who became FRS in 1967), was working on muscle and took the main responsibility for the biological side of the work. Dr Marjorie M'Ewen, a lecturer in physics, was another recruit from St Andrews. At least half a dozen others were active in research, not to mention the laboratory photographer Freda Ticehurst, whom Randall had recruited personally from his old lab at GEC, and who worshipped the ground he walked on.

In the early 1950s women engaged in scientific research were still a rarity, regarded much as Dr Johnson, two centuries earlier, living in a house not far from King's, dismissed a woman's preaching as like ‘a dog's walking on its hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.' Women scientists almost never won a Nobel prize: at that time there had been only three, two of them Curies, mother and daughter. The Royal Society had by 1951 admitted only seven as Fellows — less than I per cent of the total. (The percentage would remain below four for the rest of the century.)

Of all the sciences, moreover, physics was, as it has remained, the most male-dominated. The science historian Margaret Wertheim in 1995 dubbed it ‘the priesthood of science'. In her interpretation, the persistent cultural and psychological barriers to the entry of women into physics are a legacy of ancient religious tradition: the physicist or mathematician was a kind of priest, a conduit to God the divine mathematician. Physics departments in the egalitarian United States were scarcely more welcoming to women than they were in Europe. Harvard University's physics department in the 1950s, maintained a policy against the hiring of women even as instructors — a ban that endured for a further two decades. (No woman professor gained tenure in physics until 1992.) Princeton was worse. In the 1950s not only were women forbidden to teach physics, they were not allowed into the physics building. They were, the head of the department believed, a distraction. A female nuclear physicist invited to Princeton to use the cyclotron had to creep in under cover of darkness.

Randall's lab offered a strong contrast to this misogyny. Not only did he have many women on his staff, but they tended to find him as an employer sympathetic and helpful. Himself married, with an invalid wife, Randall liked women around him, and rumours persist of a personal attachment to one of his staff. He also enjoyed social life, and liked to see his flock, men and women, come together for morning coffee, and at lunch in the joint dining room where he ate with them nearly every day. Above all, there was afternoon tea: ‘a command performance', Louise Heller recalled. Another command performance was the annual departmental cricket match, with Randall, a cricket fiend, donning flannels and pads to bat for biophysics.

When Maurice Wilkins got back to King's in January 1951, he got his first look at Rosalind. She was sitting at a desk in a small office and when she turned round he, like Gosling, was first struck by her eyes — ‘steady watchful dark eyes'. He found her ‘quietly handsome' and exuding such confidence that when she stood up, he was surprised to see that she was not as tall as he had thought.

During the next few months they worked on DNA separately but cordially. She wrote up her Paris work for what seemed to him a long time but he did not bother her. He continued to look through microscopes to watch how DNA fibres swelled and lengthened as they absorbed water. He discussed with her a paper he was preparing on extensible molecules and included her in his acknowledgements.

He was wary of her peremptory manner. Once when he stood at the doorway talking, without turning in her chair she indicated with a wave of her hand that he should come in and sit down. Yet they occasionally lunched together on a Saturday at the Strand Palace Hotel, where those who had come into the lab — mainly those who were single — went for the buffet, which was inexpensive and good. Conversation was not difficult. Rosalind was interested in theatre, books and politics. Like him, she was a
New Statesman
devotee and, with Britain joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, she advocated neutrality in the Cold War. Both of them disliked intensely the idea of science for profit. Occasionally what Wilkins called ‘spikiness' would show. One Saturday as they ate fruit salad with cream, he remarked that the cream had been good. ‘But it was not real cream,' Rosalind corrected him. Wilkins felt rebuked. Not having lived in Paris in the post-war years, he had obviously forgotten what real cream tasted like.

In mid-century, despite O.T. Avery's discovery at the Rockefeller Institute in 1944, it was by no means generally accepted that the nucleic acid DNA was the genetic material. Many scientists still believed that genes were made of protein. Wilkins, for his part, had picked on the molecular structure of the gene for its intrinsic interest, seeing it as the most rewarding problem to attack as he moved into biology. Before long, however, he and his colleagues received important advice from a colleague who had worked in New York: ‘trust Avery'.

By 1951 King's had made good progress towards figuring out the structure of DNA. Randall said so himself. In a lecture to the Royal Society on 1 February, he began by asking that his new unit not be ‘judged too severely' in comparison with much longer-established institutions, alluding to its apparently slow start.

In his talk, titled ‘An Experiment in Biophysics', Randall outlined with some pride a varied programme of investigation into the nature of the cell by all optical techniques, by a research staff of twenty-six, including one Turner and Newall Fellow (i.e., Rosalind). In discussing his unit's advances in nucleic acids, he generously gave credit to work done in London at Birkbeck. Sven Furberg, a young Norwegian researcher there on a British Council scholarship, had woken them all up to an error in the pre-war X-ray work of Astbury of Leeds. In a model he had built of the nucleic acid, Furberg showed that the sugars were at right angles to — not parallel with — the bases stacked like pennies.

At the same time Randall paid tribute also to the sample of DNA they were working on at King's — the gel supplied by Professor Signer of Berne. When Wilkins and others had wetted this gel, they had drawn fibres that could be extended to double their original length — a process called ‘necking' — and then shrunk back again.

Randall alerted his audience to the audacity of his attempt to map the living cell. The congestion and disorder of the King's College site, he said, was a good symbol for biophysics: ‘This breaking down of the mental and physical boundaries associated with workers of highly different training and tradition is a necessary beginning to successful research in a borderline field.'

The words of a pompous pioneer, perhaps, but what was the point of modesty? Had he not helped win the war?

Rosalind was working without benefit of academic appointment or rank. Like a distinguished refugee arriving in a new country without baggage or reputation, she had entered a field in which the quality of her previous work was largely unknown except to the two professors, Randall and Coulson. Wilkins did not appreciate how senior she had been in Paris. Her other colleagues certainly did not. Holes in coal, or the lack thereof, were of little interest to a biophysicist.

The people she found most congenial were two women junior to herself: a young Austrian, Marianne Friedlander, and Freda Ticehurst, who ran the photographic laboratory which developed and printed the X-ray films the scientists took. Freda, an excellent technician, was warm, fun, and motherly. She was also mothered by everybody, for she had lost her fiancé during the war. Randall certainly did when, in September 1950, on the pretext of borrowing some slides, he had returned to his old GEC lab at Wembley, and invited her to come to King's to equip and run the photographic laboratory.

Freda's darkroom was a refuge for the entire lab. Randall himself often stopped by for a chat. Rosalind too would come in for a break, particularly on the first day of her menstrual period when she suffered from severe cramps. She would be given an aspirin and a hot drink. But sympathy was not what she wanted. Her reaction was ‘Oh well. I just have to put up with it.' Freda sympathised with Ray Gosling too, at those times of Rosalind's month.

 

Rosalind's craving for foreign friends in London was rewarded when she met Simon and Bocha Altmann from Argentina. Simon Altmann, a Jewish refugee to South America during the war, was a friend of Vittorio Luzzati's; they had been students together at the University of Buenos Aires. Altmann had come to King's from Argentina as a graduate student in theoretical physics; his wife Bocha, a biochemist, was a British Council fellow at University College.

Altmann was appalled to see the predicament in which Rosalind found herself. Coulson, his own professor in theoretical physics, himself a reluctant recruit from Oxford (to which he would soon return), kept his distance from the macho rowdies in ‘Experimental'. To Altmann, it was little short of a tragedy that someone of Rosalind's sensitivity and ability should be in an atmosphere so utterly alien to her. ‘Very well read in two languages, she was used to a civilised intellectual life, discussing painting, poetry, theatre and existentialism,' he said. Now she found herself among people who had never heard of Sartre, whose chief reading was the
Evening Standard,
and who enjoyed ‘the type of girls that would get drunk at departmental parties and be passed from lap to lap having their bra undone'. People at the lab knew about Rosalind's friendship with Luzzati and thought he was her lover. Altmann knew he was not.

Altmann felt that Rosalind, with five years of distinguished post-doctoral work to her credit, was undervalued by all at King's, not least by Randall. The personal antipathy between her and Wilkins was just a part of the problem.

The bright spot in Rosalind's London life was her new flat on Drayton Gardens in South Kensington. Modestly furnished, it looked luxurious to her friends most of whom lived in cramped quarters with shared bathrooms or kitchens. Four rooms on the fourth floor of a purpose-built, 1930s block, Donovan Court, it was around the corner from the Fulham Road and the Forum Cinema, and was approached by a lift and a quiet, wide hallway. Windows at the back looked out at the streetlamps of the paved walkway, Thistle Grove.

Rosalind loved the flat, the first real home of her own. She made her own curtains and pressed friends to use the place when she was away. Her American friend from Paris, Anne Sayre, claimed credit for persuading Rosalind to dip into her personal capital for her own comfort, abandoning her usual self-denying ordinance to live only on her wages. Penny-pinching had made some sense in Paris, Anne argued, when currency restrictions forbade the import of funds. But for anyone who was not genuinely hard-up (as Anne felt she and her husband were), it was self-indulgence to economise from choice rather than necessity. To Anne's amazement, Rosalind ‘not only took my lecture meekly but proceeded to take the flat, and to use — though always sparingly — the private income she had always previously scorned'.

Just as she was a serious scientist and serious walker, Rosalind was a serious cook. A decent kitchen all to herself gave her the opportunity to entertain as had not been possible before. She gave many dinner parties and, cooking being a branch of chemistry, was very good at it. She introduced her English guests to French cuisine with the same missionary air with which Elizabeth David's highly popular book
Mediterranean Cooking
was preaching the virtues of olive oil, garlic, parmesan and basil to enliven the dreary national diet.