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OCR for page 303
13
Rosalind Elsie F'anklin
July 25, 1920-~1 16, 1958
PHYSICAL CHEMIST
WITH A GLASS WAND, Rosalind Franklin gently coaxed
apart the lintlike fibers of DNA. Pulling them as thin as spider silk,
she bunched them in tiny packets of parallel strands. Then deli-
cately controlling the humidity, she beamed X rays at the little
bumbles and photographed the thread of life.
Quick, fierce, and fun-loving, Rosalind Franklin was a com-
mamding leader, an idealist about science, and in her time the su-
preme experimentalist analyzing the molecules of heredity.
Fascinated by matter, what the world is made of, and how it
formed, Franklin liked facts—indisputable, provable, hardcore
facts—not high-flown theories or insubstantial speculation. As she
declared, "Facts are facts." While still in her early twenties, she had
uncovered data about coal that established her reputation as am ex-
pert experimentalist. The evidence she later revealed about viruses
helped lay the foundation for structural biology.
In the early 1950s, Franklin almost discovered by herself—
enough information about the structure of DNA to explain the mo-
lecular basis of heredity. DNA a molecule found in all living cells, is
the coded blueprint for transmitting inherited characteristics from
one generation to another. The facts she did uncover about the mob
ecule helpedJames Watson and Francis Crick beat her to the Nobel
Prize data they used without her knowledge amd without fully cred-
iting her.
Once the structure of DNA was understood, the field of molecu-
lar biology exploded; it became the most significant scientific deveL
opment of the late twentieth century. The most important
technology of the twenty-first century is expected to be bioengineer-
ing or recombinant DNA, in which programmed DNA is injected
into organisms to produce a desired characteristic in future genera-
303
OCR for page 304
304 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
tions. For example, insulin, growth hormone, and the clotting factor
missing from the blood of hemophiliacs are already manufactured
commercially in simple organisms with recombinant DNA technol-
ogy.
Today, as the facts about Franklin's life and scientific prowess
have emerged, they have cast a shadow on Watson's and Crick's
achievement and reestablished Franklin's place in the sun.
Rosalind Franklin was born in London on July 25, 1920, the
second of five children in a wealthyJewish banking family. Her an-
cestors had lived in England since 1763, and her grandparents lived
in upper-class English style. They had a large house in a comfortable
section of London and a country home and, when they wintered in
the Mediterramean a retinue of English servants accompanied them.
Rosalind's father, Ellis Franklin, and her mother, Muriel Waley,
were raised in a tradition of public service and philanthropy. Her
banker father taught science as a volunteer at the Working Men's
College and helped numerous Jews escape from Nazi Germany.
Among her aunts were socialists and activists in women's causes and
trade unionism. An uncle was such a strong supporter of women's
rights that he served six weeks in prison in 1910 for taking a dog
whip to Winston Churchill, then a prominent antisuffragist. Another
relative was elected to Parliament three times before the government
ruled thatJews couth serve without taking an oath of office on a New
Testament Bible.
As a child, Rosalind felt discriminated against because she was a
girl. She thought her family did not lmdel stand her and remembered
her childhood as a tense struggle for recognition. Because she did
not like "let's pretend" games and detested dolls, her parents found
her "practical and unsentimental...literal-minded and not imagina-
tive." She preferred making things sewing, carpentry, and Meccamo
building sets. While her mother praised Rosalind's "exquisitely neat"
embroidery and a "beautifully planed" coin cabinet, her analytical
mind was harder to recognize.
But Rosalind needed reasons, proofs, and facts. She read
through the Bible to find a reason for believing in God and con-
cluded, "Well, anyhow, how do you know He isn't a She?" Quick,
logical, and precise herself, she was impatient with slipshod, vague,
and woolly arguments.
When Rosalind was eight years old, she caught a string of colds
amd flus, and the family doctor recommended a convalescent board-
ing school near the coast. With the best of intentions, her parents
agreed. Somewhat hopefully, her mother regarded Rosalind's year
away from home as "a neutral experience." As far as she could tell,
Rosalind was "a little homesick...but never actively unhappy."
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Rosalind Elsw liianklin
305
Rosalind Franklin at a Ciba Foundation conference in London on the na-
ture of viruses. March 26-28, 1956.
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306 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
April 2, 1956. Rosalind Franklin in Madrid with left to right) Ann CuDis,
Francis Crick Donald Caspar, Aaron Klug, Odile Crick, andJohn
Kendrew.
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Rosalind Elsie liianklin
307
Asked how she was getting on, the lithe girl replied laconically, "A11
right." In truth, Rosalind hated the school and always resented that
year away from home.
Rosalind absorbed a lesson from her boarding school convales-
cence. She decided that it was safer to ignore illness and pain titan to
seek help. When a needle became stuck deep in her knee joint, she
walked for blocks to a hospital alone and in excruciating pain.
In London, she attended St. Paul's Girls' School, am academi-
caH~y rigorous day school for the daughters of well-to do families.
During part of one semester, she stayed in a Parisian pension to im-
prove her French. She returned home am ardent Framcophile with a
zest for French dressmaking, cooking, and travel. From then on, she
made her own clothes and raised and lowered her hemlines with
each changing fashion
Thanks to the excellent physics and chemistry classes offered by
St. Paul's, Rosalind decided by age fifteen to become a scientist. An
avid amateur astronomer, she followed star maps in the Iamdon Ames
and searched night skies for constellations. Hoping to study physical
chemistry at Cambridge University, she took—and passed—the en-
trance examinations. She was in for a bitter disappointment.
Her father, who strongly disapproved of university education
for women, refused to pay for her to attend Cambridge. He had
once planned a science career for himself and would have been de-
lighted if a son had pursued the same course. But women should do
good works as volunteers; they should not be professionals. His re-
fusal touched off the only crisis in her parents' happy marriage.
Rosalind's favorite aunt, Alice Franklin, stormed over to inform her
brother blat she would personally send Rosalind to Cambridge. In
the ensuing row, Rosalind's mother announced that she, Muriel,
would pay for Rosalind's education out of her own family money.
Faced with dlree irate women in the family, Ellis Franklin backed
down and agreed to pay for Rosalind's university education. His ap-
proval was grudgingly given and resentfully received. Rosalind loved
her mother deeply, but she never entirely forgave her father, even
though her virus work eventually made him quite proud. As she fre-
quendy told friends, daughters have special disadvantages.
In 1938, a year before the outbreak of World War II, Rosalind
Franklin entered Newnham College, a women's college in Cam-
bridge University. For a woman Cambridge was much like a girls'
boarding school. Before a Newnham women could entertain a rnam
in her room, she had to move her bed out into a public corridor.
Women faculty members, most of them unmarried, seemed extraor-
dinarily serious and formidable. Franklin decided that she never
wanted to be like them. Years later, she almost turned down a job
OCR for page 308
308 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
offer from Cambridge, rather than become a Cambridge woman
don.
The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 precipitated
another disagreement with her father. Ellis Franklin wanted
Rosalind to quit the university and do volunteer defense work.
Rosalind, on the other hand, was determined to continue her stud-
ies. Luckily, the government made it clear that all science students
should complete their education.
One of the few blessings of the war was Rosalind's friendship
with Adrienne Weill, a distinguished French woman physicist who
had worked with Marie Curie and IreneJoliot-Curie at the Curie
Institute. After Weill's escape to England, she worked in Cambridge
where Franklin became her friend and for one year her boarder. It
was Weill who found Franklin a job and a room in Paris after the war.
After graduating from Cambridge in 1941, Franklin spent a
year doing research in physical chemistry with the future Nobel
Prize-winning chemist Ronald Norrish. Then she took an unpromis-
ing job that established her reputation as a research scientist. As her
contribution to the war effort, she began to study the physical struc-
ture of coals and carbon for the British Coal Utilization Research
Association. Rooming with a cousin, she bicycled furiously through
air raids across the exposed Putney Common each day to her job in
South London. She never complained, but she was terrified. (During
her last illness, she suffered delirious nightmares about cycling
across the common and wondering if the war would ever end.)
In her laboratory, Franklin focused on a large and important
wartime problem: how to use Englamd's coals and charcoals more
eflicieutly. In a series of elegantly executed experiments, she discov-
ered the structural changes that occur when coal and carbons are
heated amd showed why some heated carbons turn into graphite as
their molecules form parallel layers that slip and slide apart. She did
the laboratory work herself, producing masses of experimental
data. When the laboratory banned uncertified personnel from its
machine shops, she simply turned its warning signs around and
kept on working.
Between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six, she published
five papers on coals and carbons that are still quoted extensively to-
day. Her research helped found the science of high-strength carbon
fibers. It proved vitally irnpoltant for both the old charcoal industry
amd for nuclear power, which uses graphite to slow the rate of fission.
The work earned her a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in physi-
cal chemistry in 1945 and made her, at age twenty-six, a recognized
authority in industrial chemistry. By today's standards, she was al-
most unbelievably youmg to have produced such important research.
OCR for page 309
Rosalind Elsie liianklin
309
Franklin soon realized that she needed to master the developing
field of X-ray crystallography in order to understand matter—the
material that the universe is made of. Crystallography, a branch of
physics, is a powerful technique used to reveal the position of atoms
within matter. Traditionally, crystallographers aim X rays at crystal-
lme solids composed of atoms arranged in a regular and repeated
pattern. The X rays enter the crystal; many of the rays pass com-
pletely through, but others are reflected inside the crystal and exit in
different directions to strike photographic film or other types of de-
tectors. (See figures 10.1 and 10.2, on pages 232 and 233.) By study-
ing the intensity amd amble of the spots on the film, researchers could
figure out the positions of the atoms within a crystal. Crystallogra-
phy was a British invention and specialty, and many women like the
Nobel Prize-winner Dorothy Hodgkin, achieved early prominence
111 it.
Franklin was never a traditional crystallographer, however. She
never worked with regular, single crystals. Instead, she pioneered
the use of X-ray diffraction to study disordered matter like carbons
and complicated matter like large biological molecules.
When the war ended in 1945, Franklin wrote Adrienne Weill to
ask if she knew any jobs in Framce for someone who knew a little
about physical chemistry and a lot about the holes between carbon
molecules. Through Weill, she foumd a job in Paris at the Labora-
toire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat, beginning in 1947.
When Franklin arrived in Paris at the age of twenty-seven, she
began the happiest three years of her life. A strikingly good-looking
woman she had clear olive skin, raven black hair, and brilliant eyes
that could sparkle with amusement or flash with rage. Slim and
quick-moving, she dressed fashionably in am understated Europeam
style. Her coworkers were young, many of them Communists from
the wartime French Resistance. Together, they lumched in bistros,
invited one another for dinners, spent weekends picnicking, and took
group vacations climbing mountains, skiing, and camping. At first,
she was shocked at such closeness; Cambridge women were not used
to males and females sharing hotel rooms.
Speaking French, Franklin seemed to shed her British reserve.
"She was a great deal of fun, not a heavy person at all," said Anne
Sayre, her biographer and friend in Paris. "I thought she was very
young for her age, sligEdy prankish, teasing. She was older than I
was, but I felt like her aumt." Off work, Franklin could sparkle gaily
with a slightly teasing, mischievous wit. Although "formal occa-
sions" like banquets made her glum, she loved small dinners. She
became an expert on the latest French slang and played elaborate
French word games at top speed. She liked gossiping about friends'
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310 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
tangled love affairs and shopping in flea markets, street fairs, and
department stores. Her conversation was light, quick, observant, and
often amusing. "Gaiety was her note," crystallographer David Sayre
remarked.
After the war years cooped up in England, Franklin gloried in
being able to travel freely aroumd the Continent. She plotted itinerar-
ies with minute precision, correlating maps, guide books, and inter-
national timetables to locate the most economical routes through the
most mountainous scenery. She loved mountains and outdoor life,
strenuous twenty-mile-a-day hikes, and bike tours—no matter what
the weather. She could react in surprising ways to travel incidents,
though. A friend, Vittorio Luzzati, complained sharply about their
hiking in foul weather one day, and her eyes filled with tears. On
another hike, Luzzati found an artillery shell from the war and
showed it around; Franklin blanched, stiffened, and turned away.
Something had happened during the war, he thought, that she could
not discuss.
She could be happily married, but she did not wamt children, she
confided to Luzzati's wife, Denise. Franklin loved children too much
to hamd them over to nannies, and her commitment to science pre-
vented her from being a full-time mother. Nor did she like her par-
ents' upper-class lifestyle. Her flat was simple, and although her
family was well-to-do, she was a Socialist.
She worked in a nineteenth-century French army explosives
laboratory that was flooded with light, coated with dust, and stuffed
with old brassworks. While working, Franklin was intense, reserved,
and private even austere. She took science seriously and hated to
waste time. Although she disliked idle chitchat at work, she loved a
good science argument, and she and David Sayre argued crystallog-
raphy hammer and tongs. As far as she was concerned, passionate
debates were part of the fim of being a scientist. She could be pitiless
and make seminar speakers feel like fools. Coworkers who left the
darkroom a shambles made her amgry. She was unmauTied in her late
twenties, though, and the French in the 1950s dismissed her foibles
as spinsterish.
By 1950, after three years in Framce, Franklin realized she had to
get down to business. If she wamted a career in England, it was time
to go home.
Her timing was excellent. Crystallographers already knew how
to determine atomic positions in small, simple, and highly regular
crystals. Now they were turning to extremely large and complex ar-
rangements in biological matter. Borrowing techniques from physics,
biologists and biochemists were solving one major problem after am-
other.
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Rosalind Elsie liianklin
311
PhysicistJohn Randall, who invented the key to radar in World
War II, fommed am interdisciplinary team of physicists, chemists, and
biologists to study living cells at King's College in the University of
London. The team knew that DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid, to be
precise) carries genetic infommation from one generation to another.
It was also known that atoms of many proteins are shaped like a he-
lix, that is, like a spiral staircase or an extended coil of springs. But
no one understood DNA's structure or dreamed that it would ex-
plain heredity.
At King's, a graduate student named Raymond Gosling was tak-
ing X-ray photographs of DNA molecules. His photos were the best
yet taken, but Randall decided an expert should analyze them.
Randall went headbunting, heard about Rosalind Franklin, found
her a fellowship, and hired her. Writing to Franklin to explain her
new job, Randall made it clear that she would be working alone on a
new topic, not the subject they had discussed earlier: "After very
careful consideration and discussion with the senior people con-
cerned, it now seems that it would be a good deal more important
for you to investigate the structure of certain biological fibres in
which we are interested.... This means that as far as the experimen-
tal X-ray effort is concerned, there will be at the moment only your-
self and [the graduate studenq Gosling, together with the temporary
assistance of a graduate from Syracuse, Mrs. Helter."
Franklin arrived for her first day of work at King's College in
1951 and walked straight into a meeting fraught with consequences
for her future. Randall's second in command, Maurice Wlllcins, was
away for a short holiday. Wilkins had been Randall's graduate stu-
dent before World War II, had worked on the atomic bomb during
the war, and was to play a crucial and controversial role in Franklin's
life at the laboratory. In Wilkins's absence, Randall attended the
meeting. And Randall turned DNA and Gosling over to Franklin
"lock, stock, and barrel." No one in the lab had worked on DNA for
several months, and Franklin assumed she was in charge. When
Wilkins returned, on the other hand, he supposed she had been
hired as a high-class technical assistant to supply the team with ex-
perimental data for it to analyze.
Gosling was caught in the middle. "I don't think ~trllkins ever
imagined that giving a problem to Rosalind meant that nobody else
was going to work on it. The lab wasn't built like that, but Rosalind
was built like that." Later, Gosling wondered if anyone had bothered
to explain to Franklin the department's hierarchical command struc-
ture, Wilkins's position as its linchpin, or the fact that team members
worked and published together. Certainly, King's was the only place
where Franklin had much difficulty working with colleagues.
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312 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
Although Gosling had been handed from one thesis adviser to
another like a bale of hay, he quickly decided blat Franklin was "ter-
rific." She had a strong personality that people either loved or hated.
She had strong opinions and high principles and did not compro-
mise; if something was worth discussing, it was worth defending. She
was dedicated, but she had a good sense of humor. As she told a
friend, "What's the point of doing all tills work, if you don't get
some fun out of it?" Once, while trying to understand how radiation
penetrates the skin of a sphere, she and Gosling peeled oranges. Giv-
ing up in frustration, they had a glorious orange fight, hurling fruit
at each other across the lab.
Franklin needed a research partner so she could toss ideas
aroumd instead of oranges. As Francis Crick pointed out later, "It is
one of the requirements for collaboration of this sort that you must
be perfectly candid, one might almost say rude, to the person you
are working with. It is useless working with somebody who is either
much too junior than yourself, or much too senior, because then
politeness creeps in and tills is the end of all good collaboration in
science." Gosling was too young and inexperienced to be the coun-
terpoint Franklin needed. Unfortunately, there were few other pros-
pects in sight.
Wilkins was the obvious candidate. He was interested in DNA,
and he and Franklin got along at first. But WlLkins was "meditative,
speculative, markedly indecisive," wrote the historian Horace
Judson. He was "shy, passive, indirect...he could respond to vigor-
ous disagreement only by turning aside." WlLIcins thought carefully
before speaking; Franklin was quick, decisive, and impulsive, and
could snap at people. "She scared the wits out of me," Wilkins told
colleague Aaron Klug. Between Wilkins's shyness and Franklin's
lack of small talk, their meetings consisted mosdy of staring at each
other. Only later did their relationship deteriorate into antipathy and
whatJudson called "one of the great personal quarrels in the history
of science."
At lunch, Franklin discovered that King's College was consider-
ably more formal titan Paris. A number of women scientists worked
on the staff, but they were not allowed to eat with the men in the
men's common room; women ate outside the lab or in the students'
cafeteria. After work, the men visited a male-only bar for beer and
shoptalk; the women were not invited. As a result, the men talked
science casually among friends while the women operated in a more
formal office atmosphere. Later, Franklin concluded that King's was
also cool to foreigners amdJews.
Shut off from casual friendships at King's, Franklin developed a
social life that was almost completely independent from the labora-
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Rosalind Elsie Franklin
313
tory. She reserved her evenings and weekends for the theater and
films, volunteer work for the Labour party, friends from St. Paul's
School and Cambridge, weekly visits with her family, and trips to
the countryside. At home, she gave smaD dinner parties where she
introduced British friends to French delicacies like artichokes, new
potatoes cooked in butter, and good wine. On holidays she snor-
keled in Corsica, climbed mountains in the Alps and Yugoslavia, and
toured Israel and Europe, snapping pictures wherever she went.
At the lab, Franklin and Gosling worked alone, collecting
enough data about DNA to write five papers. Between her articles,
reports, and the lab notes she kept in little red exercise books—Al of
which passed at her death to her friend and colleague Aaron Klug—
it is possible to follow her work over the next few years.
First, she adjusted her X-ray camera to get a needle-fine beam.
Then she worked on her DNA sample. Purified DNA looks like the
fibrous lint from am old handkerchief, but no one had ever deci-
phered the molecular structure of such complex fibrous matter. Pre-
vious experimenters had tried, using thick DNA fibers. Franklin,
who had already worked with amorphous coals and clay structures,
knew how to deal with materials that were not fuDy crystalline. So
she was able to invent a new and better method of aligning DNA's
lintlike fibers.
With a glass rod, she pulled thinner fibers than had ever been
made before and laid them paraDel. Since a single fiber was too fine
to scatter an X-ray beam, she bundled the gossamer threads together
for bulk. Then she matched the optics of the X-ray beam to the di-
ameter of the fibers to get a clearer picture. Finally, she studied how
the fibers behaved in a humid atmosphere. Standing them over a
closed container of saltwater, she measured the moisture concentra-
tion in the air and correlated it to the behavior of the fibers. As a
physical chemist, she realized that humidity control was one of the
keys to getting a clear picture. Water molecules, fining the spaces
between the atoms of a crystal, hold the crystal erect and stable.
Soon, she could show that DNA molecules exist in two forms, A
and B. depending on how much water they absorb. When the air
surrounding the fibers reached a relative humidity of 75 percent, her
X-ray photographs resembled the best pictures that Gosling had
taken before her arrival. She caned these photographs the dry, A-
form of DNA. When the humidity rose to aroumd 95 percent, the
molecules stretched 25 percent longer and actuary popped off their
stand. X rays scattered by these wet fibers produced fewer details on
the photographic film. instead, they made a simple cross shape, the
characteristic sign of a helix, as Franklin knew. The cross indicated
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Rosalind Elsie Franklin
321
the important point about DNA is the base pairing. It is the code
Blat passes individual characteristics on to succeeding generations.
Crick's memory is blat he suggested base-pairing on February
27. But Watson's book claims that he, and no one else, figured that
part out the next day. Using evidence uncovered by biochemist
Erwin Chargaff, Watson knew that pairs of bases form the steps of
the helical staircase. Building models of the molecule showed him
Blat each step consists of aparticz~larpairofbases: adenine with thym-
ine or guanine with cytosine.
To reproduce itself, DNA simply divides in half longitudinally,
leaving one outside chain attached to one of the bases; the oomple-
mentary base is attached to the opposite chain. Finally, each chain
makes its complement and recombines. This incredibly simple
mechanism explains how genetic information cam pass from genera-
tion to generation for thousands of years without change. Trium-
phandy, Watson and Crick showed their model to colleagues and
wrote their friends. Strangely, neither told Franklin or Wilkins about
it, despite the help they had received from Franklin's data.
Working on the B-form photograph in February, Franklin broke
through the impasse that had blocked her for nine months. By Feb-
ruary 23, she knew for sure Blat the wet B-form is helical and that its
helix is made of two, not three, chains. Counting her deduction
about the location of the phosphate chains on the outside of the he-
lix, she now had two of the four vital points about DNA. She had
not yet recognized the remaining two concepts: the one side down/
other side up chains and the base pairing. Nevertheless, at the begin-
ning of March, she and Gosling wrote a paper summarizing what
they knew about the beautiful B-form photograph.
By the time Franklin got her mamuscript typed, it was March 17,
1953. The next day, a Nature magazine editor called. Watson and
Crick had solved the structure of DNA. They had submitted an ar-
tide on March 6. The editor thought WILIcins and Franklin might
like to contribute articles to accompany theirs. Hastily, Franklin re-
vised her mamuscript slightly to support Watson and Crick's hypoth-
esis. They had won the race even before Franklin knew they were
competing.
Nature rushed the Watson and Crick article into print faster tham
it had published anything before. The article is scarcely one thou-
sand words long, a mere one page. It offers a hypothesis without
proofs. It cites no authorities or historical record. Nor does it credit
the scientists on whose shoulders it was built. Crick and Watson
could have published their theory joindy with Franklin. Instead,
they merely thanked physical chemistJerry DonoLue for "constant
advice amd criticism." Then, in the next-to-last sentence they add am-
OCR for page 322
322 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
biguously, "We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the
general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of
Dr. M. H. E Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin, and their co-workers at
King's College, London."
Could Franklin have solved the structure of DNA on her own?
Her friends and supporters have debated that ever since. Franklin
has become a patron saint of feminists, and for them the answer is
clear. "Had Franklin not had her work secretly taken from her and
had she thus been allowed enough time to use her data to solve her
puzzle, there is hardly any doubt that she would have unraveled the
helix—perhaps even before Crick and Watson. For, after all, Watson
and Crick would then have had to have made their own unequivocal
photographs of the DNA helix. This they had not succeeded in do-
ing," charged G. Kass-Simon in Women of Science: Righting the Record.
Franklin's colleague Aaron Klug thinly she was only one amd a
half steps away from solving DNA on her own and that she would
have done so eventually: one-half step for the opposite direction of
the chains and a whole step for the base pairs. Klug's opinion is not
to be dismissed lightly. He was Franklin's closest collaborator and
friend for four years at Birkbeck. He won a Nobel Prize for chemis-
try m 1982, directed a leading molecular biology center, the Medical
Research Coumcil Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge,
and was the Royal Society's president. Moreover, he studied her pa-
pers and notebooks extensively, more closely than anyone else alive.
"It is rather heartbreaking to look at these notebooks and to see
how close she had come to the solution by herself;' Klug observed.
"Crick and I argue whether she was one and a half or two steps be-
hind. She had two things to do: She didn't know that the chains ram
in opposite directions; I maintain she was almost at the point of spot-
ting that."
"The other thing was, how do you put the bases in? She knew
they had to be on the inside; and she had talked about base inter-
chmgeability. The step from base interchangeability to base pairing
is a quite long one but she was poised to make it," Klug asserted. "If
you steep yourself in the notebooks as I have, you get the pace....
She didn't need intuition. She had facts. She wasn't highly imagina-
tive like Crick or Pauling, but she was a superb experimentalist, a
good analyst, and she'd have done it her own way."
Watson cites a curious reason for Franklin's failure to win the
DNA race. In Watson's view, Franklin lost because she was inter-
ested in the steps more than the goal, she wamted to analyze the ma-
terial herself without help, and she had "no patron, no one who
cared for her." According to Watson, Lord Victor Rothschild, who
then chaired the Agricultural Research Council, should have helped
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Rosalind Elsie liianklin
323
her. Why Rothschild? Because he was a Rothschild and she was a
Franklin related to the Samuels, an importamtJewish family in En-
glamd. "She came from one of the most prominentJewish families in
Great Britain. We had no idea who Rosalind was," Watson pro-
tested. "She just made life difficult for Wilkins."
By that time, Franklin was so disenchanted with King's College
that she had decided to leave. She asked John Desmond Bernal if
she could join his group at Birkbeck College, the graduate night
school of the University of London. Bernal agreed, provided that
Randall let her bring her fellowship. Randall and Bernal made a
gentlemanly deal: Franklin could leave and become head of her
own, larger research group—a considerable promotion—but she
could not work on nucleic acids. Prohibiting a scientist to think
about a problem she had been working on for years is unimaginable
today. But at the time, British scientists were accustomed to dividing
up the research world and allocating different projects to particular
laboratories. Randall was clearing the decks for Wilkins to pick up
his work on DNA, free of any competition from Franklin. She was
not even supposed to help Gosling finish his Ph.D. thesis. Moving to
Birkbeck in mid-March, Franklin ignored Randall and quietly
helped Gosling get his degree.
At Birkbeck College, Franklin settled into part of two ram-
shackle townhouses at 21 and 22 Torrington Square. The buildings
on either side had been bombed out during the war, and the 120-
year-old remains needed major repairs. Her first office, under the
roof, was artfully decorated with pots and pans to catch the leaks
when it rained. Each evening, she opened am umbrella and placed it
carefully over her desk to protect her papers overnight. Later, she
moved to a downstairs office.
Despite the raindrops, Franklin finished her coal and DNA stud-
ies there. She produced two papers crammed with DNA information
that, m some respects, scientists are just catching up with. By forcing
Franklin's move to Birkbeck, Randall had actually done her a favor.
Over the next five years, she published seventeen articles on viruses.
She established a reputation as the world's finest experimentalist for
dealing with helical structures. Bernal considered her one of the
"major founders of biomolecular science." Sir Lawrence Bragg said
he had not believed it was possible to discover as much about vi-
ruses as she did.
Franklin led a four-person research team at Birkbeck. Besides
Klug, she had two graduate students: Kenneth C. Holmes, now pro-
fessor at the Max Plamck Institute for Medical Research in HeideL
berg, amdJohn T. Finch, now at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular
Biology at Cambridge. Klug joined the group after he met Franklin
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324 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
on the stairs, heard about her work, and switched research topics.
He became her first and only collaborator. Known as an extraordi-
nary theoretician, he enjoyed debating with Franklin. Together they
developed "marvelously delicate techniques for securing new and
beautiful X-ray data," recalled crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin.
Franklin proved to be a commanding leader with presence and
even an aura of authority about her, recalled Finch. "She knew what
she wanted to do scientifically, and she knew experimentally how to
get there."
She was also deeply devoted to scientific research at a very high
level of performance and could be single-minded and fierce. "She
could be very pleasant, and she had a sense of fun. But in the lab,
she was actually quite tough. She could snap at people," Aaron Klug
recalled. "It would have gone quite unremarked if she had been a
man. But she stood up for things. She was rather persistent. She
wasn't the saintly, nunnish figure portrayed in the BBC film Road to
the Doz'[le Helix."
Brandeis University professor Donald Caspar, who also worked
with Franklin on viruses, remembers, "The most negative things I
can think about her are still admirable qualities.... She wouldn't put
up with nonsense. She was a very vital humam being who didn't in-
dulge in speculation."
Reminiscing years later, Holmes said, "She had charisma. She
was a fasciuatillg, very attractive woman, and she affected all of us
m a very deep way. Her friends and students have great difficulty
thinking about her because it's so painful."
Had Franklin been a man in charge of the research team, she
might have been called the "strong silent type." She did not suffer
fools graciously. She was not soft and gentle like Hodgkin, and she
did not approve of her research assistants getting distracted by ro-
manoe or hobbies. At this stage m her career, she strove for results.
And as always, she resented boring social functions. At dinner
m Birkbeck's common room one evening, she sat silent all through
the meal as others chatted. Franklin was a bit choosy about where
she put her effort and, if she did not think the occasion was impor-
tant or interesting, she did not try. But late in the dinner, she decided
to make a contribution. Thus, when there was a lull in the small
talk, she pronounced loudly: "It's a good year for mushrooms." And
that was all she said. Unaccustomed to seeing her socially, her stu-
dents decided that her only flaw was am incapacity for small talk.
Otherwise, she was a good mentor. "Go on, you do the first
draft," she told Holmes when they wrote their first paper. Then she
turned his totally inadequate draft into a good paper. "That was one
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Rosalind Elsie Franklin
325
of the nicest aspects about her," Holmes recalled. "She didn't control
you on a day-to-day basis."
Having studied DNA at King's College, Franklin began work-
ing on RNA (ribonucleic acid) at Birkbeck. She decided to work on
viruses that are composed of both RNA and protein, RNA being the
infective part of the viruses. By umderstamding RNA's structure, she
hoped to explain how a virus particle, which is not in the full sense
alive, can grow and reproduce in other cells. In Franklin's five years
at Birkbeck, her group outlined the general molecular structure of
several RNA-containing viruses and helped lay the foundation of
structural virology. At the time, her group was the world's leader in
using X-ray diffraction to uncover the molecular structure of viruses.
Like other virus researchers, she concentrated on tobacco mo-
saic virus (TMV).TMV was to viruses what corn and fruit flies
were to genetics—the model used to establish basic scientific prin-
ciples. TMV is stable, easy to handle, and abundant. She particu-
larly liked the way TMV's long, rod-shaped particles produced
detailed X-ray diffraction patterns with a wealth of information
about molecular structure. She was intrigued with TMV for two
other reasons too. She was convinced—correctly—that structural
studies of TMV would help scientists understand the organization
of other regular virus particles, including the polio virus and the
common cold virus. Second, TMV's fibrous structure was even
more technically challenging than DNA. Franklin's DNA research
had made her the world's expert in fiber diffraction so she was in-
trigued by all the difficulties involved.
Watson had hypothesized that TMV is constructed in a helix,
but a different type of helix tham DNA. Franklin swiftly confirmed
his conclusion. But when she measured the helix, she discovered
that he had underestimated the number of small protein subunits
that form each turn of the helix. She also located the long single
stramd of RNA—the carrier of the virus's genetic information and
hence the source of its infectivity. She showed that it exists—not in
the helix's central cavity—but buried deep between the subunits of
the virus's protein coat. For the first time, it was possible to under-
stand the structural relationship between protein and a nucleic acid
and how they fit together.
Watson and Crick actually met occasionally and exchanged in-
formation with Franklin and Klug on the virus structure project. See-
ing them, Franklin was cheerful and ebullient and there was no sign
of animosity among them. Franklin had great respect for Crick's
ability. She became close friends with Crick and his French wife,
Odile, and together they traveled through southern Spain one sum-
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326 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
men She was more reserved about Watson referring to him as "the
horrible American."
Franklin had a rousing argument with the director of her fund-
ing agency in 1956. Storming back from the meeting, her eyes filling
with tears of rage, she complained angrily that "the ARC refuses to
support any project that has a woman directing it." Fortunately,
friends helped arrange for a three-year grant from the U.S. Public
Health Service to continue her work at Birkbeck.
During 1956, Franklin reported on her results at conferences in
London Madrid, and New England, and visited labs in Berkeley,
Los Angeles, Pasadena, St. Louis, and New Haven. At Berkeley,
where Franklin worked for a month with the Nobel Prize-winner
Wendell Stanley, she had trouble getting a ride to a lab picnic.
Watson's stories about "Rosy," the temperamental bluestocking, had
preceded her. Afraid to tangle with her, the young people in the lab
wiggled out of giving her a ride. So Stanley himself drove her. At the
picnic, the students discovered that Franklin was actually lively and
fun, and they were forced to revise their opinions of her. Later that
summer, when she climbed in the Rocky Mountains with other
Americans, she befriended them as well. Nevertheless, Franklin was
still am outsider in the scientific establishment.
Several episodes of terrifying pain that summer sent her to am
Americam physician, who told her to see a specialist as soon as she
got home. The diagnosis was ovarian cancer. Over the next two
years, Franklin had three operations and experimental chemo-
therapy. She was irritated by doctors, nurses, and surgeons who re-
fused to answer her questions. On the other hand, she refused to
talk about the illness with her friends or relatives. Only her close
family and research group knew much about it.
After her first bout of illness, the cancer went into remission for
almost ten months amd she resumed tennis and mountain climbing,
theater going, and work. At one point, she convalesced with the
Cricks; they did not know what her operation had been for or how
serious it was, but she felt easier with friends who knew nothing.
When Crick suggested that Franklin and her group move to what
became the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge,
her main fear was that she might become a spinster professor like
those she had hated as a student. Nevertheless, she decided to move
with her group.
By accident, Frederick L. Schaffer's laboratory at the University
of California at Berkeley had crystallized some polio virus, the first
crystals ever formed from am animal virus. Schaffer's wife agreed to
try to take a thermos of the crystals to Franklin for analysis. British
customs officers questioned Mrs. Schaffer about the contents of the
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Rosalind Elsie Franklin
327
thermos. Polio caused as much fear and hysteria in the mid-twenti-
eth century as AIDS does today, and the tiny crystals in the thermos
were fuDy infectious. But she replied jaumtily, "It's polio virus. But
it's Al right. It's crystalline." She soumded so trustworthy that cus-
toms let her through.
When Franklin got the thermos, she waved it at her mother.
KYou'D never guess what's in here," she teased. "Live polio!" Then
she opened the family refrigerator and slipped the virus in.
Working with am infectious virus in a dilapidated, dirty labora-
tory without proper safety equipment was dangerous. The Salk vac-
cine had been available for only three years, and mamy people had
not yet been vaccinated against the disease. Franklin, on the other
hand, knew by now that she was dying. Watching the work, Bemal's
secretary thought Franklin was a modem Marie Curie. Soon after
Franklin's death, the polio work was halted because of the risks.
Franklin's work on smaD plant viruses attracted such wide-
spread interest that both the august Royal Society of London and
the Royal Institution of Great Britain requested material to exhibit.
In 1957, the Brussels World's Fair committee asked her to build two
models of virus molecules. The request was a great honor. During
the 1950s before jet travel and television, world's fairs were glamor-
ous amd exciting events. She was the first scientist to know enough
about the structure of a virus to build a realistic model. A revolution
in biology was just beginning. For fair visitors, her model would be
their first glimpse of biology in temms of the molecules that make up
all living orgamsms.
A smaD plastics company produced dozens of white plastic,
shoe-shaped pieces for a six-foot-taD model of TMV. Each shoe rep-
resented one molecule of the protein coat surrounding the virus.
When they arrived, however, they were ad slightly too big. So
Franklin, Klug, Finch and Holmes spent a day fling them down by
hand. When they assembled the model, they omitted a few shoes in
order to show the single strand of RNA winding around like a brace-
let near the hollow section of the molecule.
Watson had thought that TMV would "self-assemble" by repli-
cating protein subunits over and over again at the end of the grow-
ing helix. But when Franklin and Klug started putting the model
together, they discovered that getting the assembly process started
was actuaDy quite difficult. Some kind of special mechanism must be
involved, they conduded. Unraveling that process occupied the next
decade. Scientists were so interested in the models that the Royal
Institution of Great Britain displayed them before they were shipped
to Brussels.
During the last year of her life, Franklin seemed softer and easier
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328 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
Rosalind Franklin's model
of the TMV vnus
molecule, which she built
for the 1958 World's Fair,
on exhibit at the Royal
Institution in London
before transport to
to approach. Aware that she was dying, she worked on TMV until a
few weeks before her death, putting her data in order. The day after
organizing a supper party for her parents' fortieth wedding anniver-
sary, she checked into a hospital for the last time. By her bedside,
she kept am invitation from a Venezuelan laboratory to spend a year
in Caracas.
On April 16,1958, within a few minutes of the time that her last
scientific paper was due to be read at the Faraday Society, Rosalind
Franklin died. She was thirty-seven years old. She had made crucial
contributions to one of the most important discoveries of the twenti-
eth century. Her work on two other major biological problems and
the techniques for solving them helped lay the foundations of struc-
tural molecular biology. And that summer, her virus models went on
view before 42 million visitors to the Brussels World's Fair.
* * *
In 1962, four years after Franklin's death, the Nobel Prize for
medicine was awarded to Framcis Crick,James Watson and Maurice
Wilkins. On the basis of what the three winners said in their Nobel
Prize lectures, no one would have known that Franklin had oontrib-
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Rosalind Elsie Franklin
329
uted to their triumph. Their dlree Nobel lectures cite ninety-eight
references, none of them Franklin's. Ordy WlLkins included her in
his acknowledgments.
If Franklin had lived, would she have won the Nobel Prize?
Most scientists today believe that she deserved it. Nobels are given
only to living persons, however, and each prize cam have no more
than dlree winners. Would the committee have known about her
contributions? And if it had, would the committee have been willing
to give a dlird of the prize to her and not to WlLIcins? Or would the
committee have awarded two prizes, one in medicine and the other
in chemistry, and split them among four winners?
"The Nobel committees have sometimes made quirky awards,
omissions and dowrmright mistakes, but we cannot doubt that the
value of her work was known" the historiamJudson concluded. Ev-
eryone in Randall's unit at King's College knew her work; so did
Crick. Bragg, a crystallographer, would have understood the impor-
tance of her published articles. It was he who insisted that King's
College in the person of Wilkins share the Nobel Prize. Furthermore,
when the Nobel Committee studied the publications of the four sci-
entists, they would have realized that Franklin's papers contained by
far the most hard data. Had she lived, she might well have shared
the Nobel Prize for one of the twentieth century's greatest scientific
achievements.
Six years after Watson got a Nobel Prize, he wrote the Doz'[le
Helix, a breezy account of his DNA experiences. He catalogued
everyone's foibles and idiosyncrasies, from his first sentence ("I have
never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood") to Sir Lawrence Bragg
("I quietly concluded that the white-mustached figure of Bragg now
spent most of its days sitting in London clubs like the Athenaeum").
The mamuscript raised a storm. As drafts were passed around and
subjects complained about their treatment, Watson softened and
modified some of his portraits except Rosalind Franklin's. She was
dead and couth not argue.
In Watson's book, Franklin plays the role of "Rosy," the wicked
stepmother. She is both Watson's central rival and the stereotypical
old maid who keeps the plot line moving. Besides denigrating her
personality, Watson attacked her scientific abilities, accusing her of
being categorically "anti-helical" and opposed to model-building.
Fortunately, Watson could not let a good story go to waste, so he
also related how he and Crick used her data from the funding
agency report and her X-ray diffraction photograph of DNA.
In response to complaints from Franklin's friends, Watson
added an epilogue to the book. It stated that his "initial impressions
of her, both scientific and personal...were often wrong." But he did
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330 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
not change his portrayal of her in the book. His fictionalized stereo-
type of a woman who has abandoned her femininity for science
made the book more readable and exciting.
Some scientists praised its lighthearted rendition of scientific re-
search. Others were outraged. "He has carelessly robbed Rosalind of
her personality," Anne Sayre protested. Dismissing Watson as a case
of retarded emotional development, the Nobel Prize-winner Andre
Lwoff charged that "his portrait of Rosalind Franklin is cruel.... At
the very least, the fact that all the work of Watson and Crick starts
with Rosalind Franklin's X-ray pictures and that Jim has exploited
Rosalind's results should have inclined him to indulgence." Robert
L. Sinsheimer complained that the book is "unbelievably mean in
spirit, filled with the distorted and cruel perceptions of childish inse-
curity." "It was a mean meam book," observed Nobel Prize-winner
Barbara McClintock. Watson is an excellent writer but arrogant and
a well-known antifeminist, commented Nobel Prize-winner Rita
Levi-Montalcini. David Sayre believed that Watson's book lowered
the moral tone of scientific research by glorifying "the big grab for
credit." To restore Franlclin's scientific reputation Klug wrote two
papers outlining her DNA contributions for Mature magazine in 1968
and 1974.
The controversy continues to this day. As late as 1989, Anthony
Serafini's biography of Linus Pauling stated, "There are so many
actual amd possible degrees of unethical behavior that it is difficult to
draw the line. Sometimes, of course, the case is clear, as whenJames
Watson made use of Rosalind Franklin's data without crediting her
in the famed DNA race.... Certainly Watson and Crick would not
have gotten the Nobel Prize had they not stolen her data."
Despite such criticism, Watson asserted early in 1992 that if he
were writing the book again today, he would write it the same way.
"Because that was the way it happened. I told it like it was. But you
get into trouble when you tell it like it happened."
In the short run the book enhanced Watson's reputation as a
brash and brilliant young scientist on the move. In the long rum, it
contained a time bomb. His admission that he had used Franklin's
data without her knowledge has tarnished not only his brilliant
achievement but Crick's as well. And his fictionalized portrayal of
her personality and scientific achievements has made her the
martyred saint of feminists and women scientists. The oddest ele-
ment of the entire story is that it was Watson himself who brought
the facts of her contributions to light. He cast a shadow on his own
achievement and shone the sum on hers.
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Rosalind Elsie Franklin
EPILOGUE
331
InJamuary 1992 the English Heritage society placed a historical
marker outside Franklin's apartment at 22 Donovam Court, Drayton
Gardens, in the Kensington neighborhood of London. The plaque is
inscribed: "Rosalind Franklin, 1920-1958, pioneer of the study of
molecular structures including DNA, lived here 1951-1958."
* * *
Representative terms from entire chapter:
rosalind elsie
