Rosalind Franklin (33 page)

We got down to the car about
10
a.m. and were washed, and dressed and talking viruses in the lab by
5
p.m.!

 

As Rosalind left Pasadena and headed for San Francisco, she wrote home from a bus stop, ‘I have completely fallen for Southern California.'

 

That may have been her last untroubled day. At some point while in California, she was struck by sharp pains in her lower abdomen. The attack lasted two days. She dismissed it; she had always been healthy apart from a bout of jaundice when she was twenty-two. When the sharp pains came back — not once but twice — she went to an American doctor who gave her some painkillers and told her to see a doctor as soon as she got back home. It was exactly the advice she wanted. She was determined to wring the most out of her valuable trip, including return visits to Woods Hole and New York, and she did not want the inconvenience of going into an American hospital. Whatever was wrong with her could wait.

While in Berkeley, she celebrated her thirty-sixth birthday. She had decided before she left to buy a car, and the gift of money from her parents announced in birthday letters and a telegram on 26 July would go to buying things for the car ‘or alternatively on bribing an examiner to let me pass my test'. (She had no licence yet. Her cousin Ursula, an experienced driver from military service, had accompanied her as she drove twice around Hyde Park Corner trying to exit.)

Rosalind's three weeks at the Virus Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley were a let-down after the exhilarating time she had had so far:

 

As on my last trip, this is far the least friendly of the places I visit. Everybody seems to wonder why I have come and to behave as though I hadn't ... It is probably the biggest and most important virus research establishment in the world but both as a unit and as individuals they take themselves far too seriously. But I think I am managing to collect some useful information to work on when I get back. I'm staying in a somewhat sordid hotel because the person who booked it for me assured I'd be short of dollars, which I'm not, and it didn't seem worth the effort of moving.

 

Fraenkel-Conrat's wife, Bea Singer, a biochemist, noticed her air of sadness. Singer attributed it to a feeling that her work had not received due recognition. She invited Rosalind to their home and, like so many others, was impressed by Rosalind's rapport with their small children.

One reason for Rosalind's malaise was that Don Caspar would not be joining her as they had planned. His father had died suddenly of a heart attack and Caspar would be remaining with his family, who lived in Colorado Springs. Yet the Berkeley visit was not entirely devoted to laboratory work. ‘The Cousinhood' extended to America's west coast and brought her one day to the home of Rosemary Montefiore: ‘The house — quite fabulous — a concoction of Hollywood, 19th century English and palatial Mediterranean — and quite out of keeping with the way people live here but a most beautiful position in the Berkeley Hills overlooking San Francisco Bay.'

In Berkeley Rosalind also acquired two new adoring friends whom she met at a party. Ethel and Irwin Tessman were phage geneticists who had been graduate students with Don Caspar at Yale; they were at Berkeley learning new techniques in Gunther Stent's laboratory. They stood in for the absent Caspar and took Rosalind on long outings to see the giant redwoods and along the coast, where she came across a wild rocky beach

 

like a much enlarged Cornwall, with the wild life much enlarged too — mussels up to 5 inches long, enormous bulbous starfish and seaweed like trees. The sea was not rough but there was obviously a strong outward drag which would make swimming dangerous. All this seemed like a natural consequence of the Pacific being so much bigger than the Atlantic. Big sea lions too on an island covered with cormorants, and a river estuary with dozens of herons.

 

Once more Rosalind inspired rapturous adjectives from American admirers. The Tessmans found her ‘joyful, full of optimism, physically very beautiful, delightful and generous'. So smitten were they that Ethel Tessman determined to make a match between Rosalind and Caspar, sensing that the two were attracted to each other. Ethel took her clue from the way ‘Rosalind used to glow when she spoke about Don'.

Rosalind did not conceal from Don Caspar her disappointment at their broken plans and tried to work out a way in which she could see him again before she returned. In her letter of condolence, she said so three times — a forceful and open expression of feeling for the bottled-up Rosalind.

 

Berkeley

July
30
[
1956
]

 

Dear Don, I am so very sorry to hear your bad news. I've been hearing such a lot about your family from the Tessmans in the last week, I almost feel I know them — and so appreciate the more what a sad occasion this is for you.

I am sorry I shall not now see you here. I shall probably finally leave New York around Aug
20,
so perhaps I shall still have a chance of seeing you in the East? I shall probably leave here on Saturday and spend a few days sight-seeing on the way East, and then divide my remaining time between New York and Woods Hole and/or Boston (depending on Jim, Alex, etc). Anyway, after this week my address is c/o Bea. I hope I shall see you.

 

She went on to enthuse about ‘some
very
impressive Steere electron micrographs of TYM showing beautifully regular knobs' and marvelled at how long the Virus Lab had had them ‘before Ciba! [the Ciba foundation's symposium in London in March] — and Robley ‘‘wondered whether they were interesting'''. She thought she had convinced him that they were.

A few days later she was able to write to Aaron Klug, ‘I'm going to see Don after all.' She also told him that she had postponed her departure by a week to 21 August, that Fraenkel-Conrat and Robley Williams had found that the reconstituted virus was infective and that, looking forward to getting back, she hoped that Maurice Wilkins would not ask for the return of the King's camera they had been using.

Matchmaking Ethel Tessman did her best to get Rosalind to Colorado. She put Rosalind in touch with a young scientist, Seymour Lederberg, brother of the molecular geneticist Joshua Lederberg, who was driving cross-country with a friend and could give her a lift as far as Denver. Before leaving Berkeley, Rosalind was cheered by some last-minute results which made the three weeks of hard work in the important research centre worthwhile. The drive, which she had never done, through the moonscape and cathedral rocks of Utah and Nevada, gave her an opportunity to resume traveller's tales for her parents, with just a veiled reference to the ‘friend from the East' whose father had died and whom she was travelling a thousand miles to see. (Good at keeping things from her parents, she never mentioned her episodes of severe abdominal pain.)

 

Then, in spite of everything, the family urged me to come here for a few days on my way back. Finally I was driven, in
2
days, from Berkeley to Salt Lake City by two people who were driving from coast to coast, spent Tuesday night in SLC and flew on here (in Denver) Wednesday morning. Monday's drive started hot and dusty and then got very beautiful as we crossed the High Sierra mountains and picnicked by Lake Tahoe — the biggest lake after the Great Lakes, over
6,000
feet up, at sunset. We then drove on until midnight and slept out in sleeping bags in the desert, somewhat uncomfortably, by the road-side. The next day's drive was somewhat mountainous but interesting, across desert mountains of Nevada and Utah, and the extraordinary Great Salt Lake desert, which extends for about
100
miles as a great flat white sheet of salt resulting from the evaporation of salty water which seeps up from below. At the junction of these two kinds of desert is a little town consisting of a big line of ‘gas stations', a railway yard, some military officers' houses and called surprisingly Wendover! At one stage of the journey we drove nearly
60
miles looking for a tree, stone or other object which would provide shade for
3
of us to sit in and eat lunch — and finally found a shack put up for the purpose. There was no natural shade.

Here I'm being taken around the country on leisurely car rides which are a pleasant change from the rushed driving of Monday and Tuesday and entertained to truly magnificent American-style picnics, the first of them on a hill just behind the Rocky Mountains from which we watched the sun set behind the Rocky Mts while we ate.

 

Sunset over the Rockies: that Rosalind should have known Caspar well enough to have visited him in his home at a time of family bereavement says something about their closeness, even if they did talk about electron micrographs of TMV. The relationship was chaste. Caspar was in awe of her as an older woman of formidable ability. Yet, what not long after she told Dr Mair Livingstone (the good friend to whom, with a new baby, she had loaned her flat) suggests that the Caspar friendship seems to have been the nearest, Mering apart, Rosalind came to being in love. Anne Sayre's 1974 biography of Rosalind ventures that during her 1956 visit to the United States she met a man ‘she might have loved, might have married'. Sayre went further in a private letter, claiming that Rosalind was bespoken in the summer of 1956 to ‘a delightful man who was also an ideal match'. For Irwin Tessman, who had known Caspar since Yale, ‘Most telling for me was the enthusiastic way he talked about her' and added that he found it unlikely that Caspar could have had a close working relationship with such an attractive woman and yet not have been in love with her.

Ethel Tessman kept what she considered a burning secret (out of respect for Caspar's later happy marriage) for twenty years until Dr June Goodfield, researching a proposed film about Rosalind, raised the matter, to be told, ‘I've been waiting twenty years for someone to ask me that question!' Suffice it to say that three women close to Rosalind believed that she fell in love with Don Caspar that summer.

 

Rosalind concluded her two months in America with a lazy weekend in ‘perfect weather' at Woods Hole. Caroline and Francis (‘Spike') Carlson took her for a boat ride past Penzance Point so that she could see the tiny peninsula's great shingled mansions from the water. The Carlsons found her charming, fun and
‘very
good looking'. Leaving Woods Hole for New York for talks with the Rockefeller Foundation, and more lab visits, she alerted her mother to a new delay of her return:

 

I've made another and final postponement of my departure. I have reset Thursday Aug.
23,
arriving in London (at the airport) at
9.20
a.m. on Friday. Unless we arrive very late I shall go to the lab on Friday — this is why I chose to arrive Friday rather than at the weekend.

 

The postponement may have been unwise. At the beginning of the last week of her trip, while in New York, she had trouble zipping her skirt. She had always been trim, comfortable in trousers, shorts or slim skirts, yet suddenly her midriff began to bulge. Nonetheless, she kept to her timetable and on Thursday 23 August boarded the plane at Idlewild Airport. The Tessmans who were attending a conference not far away at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, came to see her off. She arrived in London next morning, and went straight to the lab as planned.

But she knew she needed medical attention. She went to see Mair Livingstone, who was in general practice in Hampstead, and listed her symptoms. ‘You're not pregnant?' asked Livingstone. ‘I wish I were,' was the answer. Livingstone instantly suspected ovarian trouble. However, she simply told Rosalind that it sounded like a cyst and she ought immediately to see the University College Hospital doctor (Dr Linken) who had examined her four months earlier.

Linken also thought of the obvious first. But after vaginal and rectal examinations, he wrote in his note to the surgeon who would see Rosalind the following day, 30 August, ‘there is no reason to believe there is a pregnancy — ectopic or otherwise'. Professor Nixon, who saw her, felt the large lump in the right pelvis, told her she had to come into hospital, and marked her case file in large letters, ‘URGENT'.

Clearing her desk prior to admission, Rosalind wrote several long letters. To Wendell Stanley at Berkeley she summed up her three weeks at the Virus Laboratory at Berkeley. At first she had prepared orientated gel specimens for X-ray from reconstituted TMV and from TMV protein combined with Ochoa polymers (a synthetic pseudo-RNA, in which all the bases were the same), but the experiment failed. Eventually, she found that treatment with ribonuclease allowed her to obtain the normal optical and flow properties of the virus. This led her to conclude that the original specimen had been gummed up with excess RNA in preparation. Now she could see a way to get it ready without distortion for X-ray analysis.

To Dr Pomerat at the Rockefeller Foundation, she wrote, with gratitude, that the pace of American virus research was so rapid that ‘a large proportion of the most interesting results are still unpublished, and it is only by personal contacts that one can even form a general impression of what is going on'.

Three days later Rosalind was admitted to University College Hospital as a National Health patient for investigation of ‘an abdominal mass'. The operation on 4 September revealed, Professor Nixon reported to Dr Linken, ‘the findings are most unfortunate': not one tumour but two. In the hearty terminology favoured by Harley Street medical men of the day, Nixon described the large lump in the position of the right ovary as the ‘size of a croquet ball', and the cyst found on the left ovary ‘in size equal to a tennis ball'.

The surgeon was less metaphorical when he rang up Rosalind's parents. Muriel Franklin answered and was told, ‘Your daughter has cancer.'