Rosalind
Franklin was born in London on 25th July
1920. She attended St. Paul's Girls' School and became aware of the
international political situation when her parents took in two Jewish
children from Nazi Germany to live
in their home as part of the family. Rosalind shared her room with
Evi Eisenstrdter whose father had been sent to Buchenwald
a Concentration
Camp in Germany.
Rosalind
studied chemistry and physics at Newnham
College,
Cambridge, and in 1942 began carrying
out research at the British Coal Utilization Research Association.
Over the next four years she helped develop carbon fibre technology.
In 1947
Rosalind went to the Central Government Laboratory for Chemistry in
Paris where she worked on X-ray diffraction until 1951 when she moved
to King's College, London. Rosalind produced X-ray diffraction pictures
of DNA which were published in Nature
in April 1953. This played an important role in establishing the structure
of DNA.
Rosalind
came into conflict with Maurice Wilkins, who was also working on DNA
at King's College, and therefore decided to join John
Bernal
at Birkbeck
College
to carry
out research into the tobacco mosaic virus. In 1957 Rosalind began
to work on the polo virus.
Rosalind
Franklin died of ovarian cancer on 16th April 1958.
(1)
Rosalind Franklin was reluctant to follow instructions during bombing
raids during the Second World War. She wrote
about this issue in a letter to her parents on 5th October, 1940.
I have just had a great triumph, though a somewhat disagreeable
one. I and a few others decided it was time something was done about
the . . . going out to the trenches ... for every warning - we have
had only one quite undisturbed night - yesterday the thing went at
7.30 and lasted until 11.15. I had to do some work. We were the only
college being handicapped in this way - and I was getting badly behind.
So three of us stayed in on the first floor and boldly left the light
showing through the door. Mrs. Palmer came in in a storm and turned
us out, saying we were 'disloyal, deceitful and untrustworthy' and
were to see her today. Before we saw her she had called a meeting
to say that nobody need go to the trenches before 11 PM!
(2)
Rosalind Franklin, letter to her father (summer, 1940)
You frequently state, and in your letter you imply, that I
have developed
a completely one-sided outlook and look at everything and think of
everything in terms of science. Obviously my method of thought and
reasoning is influenced by a scientific training - if that were not
so my scientific training will have been a waste and a failure. But
you look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralising
invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be
cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday
existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be
separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In
so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment.
Your theories are those which you and many other people find easiest
and pleasantest to believe, but so far as I can see, they have no
foundation other than they lead to a pleasanter view of life (and
an exaggerated idea of our own importance).
I agree
that faith is essential to success in life (success of any sort) but
I do not accept your definition of faith, i.e. belief in life after
death. In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that
by doing our best we shall come nearer to success and that success
in our aims (the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future)
is worth attaining. Anyone able to believe in all that religion implies
obviously must have such faith, but I maintain that faith in this
world is perfectly possible without faith in another world.
(3)
Rosalind Franklin, letter to Anne and David Sayre (17th December 1953)
For myself, Birkbeck is an improvement on King's, as it couldn't
fail to be. But the disadvantages of Bernal's group are obvious -
a lot of narrow-mindedness, and obstruction directed especially at
those who are not Party members. It's been very slow starting up there,
but I still think it might work out all right in the end. I'm starting
X-ray work on viruses (the old TMV to begin with) and I'm also to
have somebody paid by the Coal Board to work under me on coal problems
more or less the continuation of what I was doing in Paris. But so
far I've failed to find a suitable person for the job.
(4)
Peggy Dyche, letter on Rosalind Franklin to Anne Sayre (31st May 1977)
There is
no doubt that she could be a
difficult character - impatient, bossy, intransigent. She always went
straight to the point and was seldom diplomatic. However, this was
all because she had such high standards and expected everyone else
to be able to reach her ideal requirements.
(5)
John Bernal, The
Times, (19th April)
She discovered in a series of beautifully executed researches,
the fundamental
distinction between carbons that turned on heating into graphite and
those that did not. Further, she related the difference to the chemical
constitution of the molecules from which the carbon was made. She
was already a recognised authority in industrial physicochemistry
when she chose to abandon this work in favour of the far more difficult
and more exciting fields of biophysics.
By the
most ingenious experimental and mathematical techniques of X-ray analysis,
she was able to verify and make more precise the illuminating hypothesis
of Crick and Watson on the double spiral structure of this substance.
She established definitely that the main sugar phosphate chain of
nucleic acid lay on an outside spiral and not on an inner one, as
had been authoritatively suggested.
In this
close collaboration between the Cambridge and London schools it is
difficult to disentangle all the contributions of individuals, but
what Miss Franklin had to give was the technique of preparing and
taking X-ray photographs of the two hydrated forms of deoxyribonucleic
acid and by applying the methods of Patterson function analysis to
show that the structure was best accounted for by a double spiral
of nucleotides, in which the phosphorus atoms lay on the outside.
(6)
James Watson, The Double Helix (1968)
Though her (Rosalind Franklin) features were strong, she was
not unattractive
and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest
in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast
with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses
showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents.
(7)
In 1968 James Watson published The Double Helix, his account
of the discovery of the structure of DNA. In his review of the book
in Labour Monthly, John
Bernal, questioned Watson's account of Rosalind Franklin's
role in the discovery.
A decisive breakthrough in human thought is not necessarily the
work of an individual genius but only of a pack of bright and well-financed
research workers following a good well-laid trail.
For 'Rosy',
in the book - I had come to know and respect her and to admire her
too, as a very intelligent and brave woman who was the first to recognise
and to measure the phosphorus atoms in the helix, which proves to
be the outer one, thus showing Pauling to be wrong and the helix to
be a double one, though this inference is not drawn.
(8)
Gaby
Hinsliff, Observer
(January 20, 2002)
The forgotten heroine of the race to unravel the mystery of human
DNA is to be honoured posthumously as part of a Government crusade
against sexism in science.
Rosalind
Franklin has become a feminist cause célèbre , the dedicated
scientist held back by her male colleagues' refusal to acknowledge
her vital role in one of the most important scientific discoveries
of the century.
While the three male scientists
who helped establish the double-helix structure of DNA shared the
Nobel prize for their breakthrough - based in large part on Franklin's
detailed X-ray images of atoms - she won little public recognition
and her early death robbed her of later fame.
'Rosy' was dismissed in
James Watson's account of the discovery, The Double Helix,
as a buttoned-up bluestocking who, her scientific partner believed,
'had to go, or be put in her place'. Only recently has her reputation
begun to be restored.
Now Patricia Hewitt, the
Trade and Industry Secretary, is to create a Franklin Medal in her
honour to raise the profile of other women scientists, with a £30,000
annual prize for exceptional innovation.
(9)
Hilary Rose, In
the Shadow of the Men, The Guardian
(15th June, 2002)
In 1975, a biography was published of a woman scientist who had
died from cancer at 37. In the research community of crystallographers,
Rosalind Franklin had been highly regarded for her ability to produce
X-ray photographs with exquisite precision, but in the wider world
she was unknown. Her friend Anne Sayre changed this, for her biography,
Rosalind Franklin and DNA, demonstrated to a huge readership that
Franklin's work was crucial to establishing the structure of DNA.
The immediate provocation
was James Watson's hugely popular book, The Double Helix (1968).
It was not just that Watson systematically stereotyped Franklin, making
her out to be a bluestocking and a frump, nor that he called her "Rosy"
when even to her intimates she was Rosalind, but that this stereotyping
enabled him to erase Franklin's crucial contribution of the X-ray
photographs that confirmed the helical structure.
Written with the support
of many crystallographers outraged by Watson's unprofessional treatment
of a colleague, above all one silenced cruelly by premature death,
Sayre's biography spoke directly to the rising women's movement. Its
subtitle, "A vivid view of what it is like to be a gifted woman
in an especially male profession", made sure of that.
The bones of the argument
are these: the Cambridge-based DNA model-builders, Francis Crick and
James Watson, needed the collaboration of the King's London-based
experimentalists, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, because only
experimentalists could provide the crucial X-ray evidence of the helical
structure. Unguardedly, Wilkins showed Franklin's photos to Crick
and Watson without her permission. Max Perutz, another Cambridge-based
scientist, also passed the model-builders a confidential report, including
Franklin's detailed notes and X-ray photographs, which he had received
as part of his Medical Research Council duties evaluating the King's
unit.
(10)
Brenda Maddox, Rosalind
Franklin (2002)
Rosalind Franklin remained virtually
unknown outside her immediate circles until 1968 when Watson published
The Double Helix, his brilliant, tactless and exciting personal
account of the discovery. In it, she is the terrible Rosy, the bad-tempered
bluestocking who hoarded her data and might have been pretty if she
had taken off her glasses and done something interesting with her
hair.
She looked
quite different to the eminent physics professor J.D. Bernal, who
brought her to Birkbeck in the spring and oversaw her five happy and
productive years there. He described her in Nature: 'As a scientist.
Miss Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection
in everything she undertook Her photographs are among the most beautiful
X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken.'
But Bernal's
words were elegiac. Rosalind Franklin's life was cut short by ovarian
cancer in 1958 when she was thirty-seven - four years before Watson,
Crick and Wilkins won the Nobel prize for their DNA discovery and
a decade before she was caricatured in a book to which, alone of the
principals portrayed, she was unable to answer back.
|
In March 1953 Maurice Wilkins of King's College
London announced the departure of his obstructive colleague,
Rosalind Franklin to rival Cavendish Laboratory scientist, Francis
Crick. But it was too late. Franklin's unpublished data and
crucial photograph of DNA had already been seen by her competitors
at the Cambridge University lab. With the aid of these, plus
their own knowledge, Watson and Crick discovered the structure
of the molecule that genes are composed of - DNA, the secret
of life. Five years later, and more brilliant research under
Bernal at Birkbeck College, at the age of thirty-seven, Risalind
died of ovarian cancer. In 1962 Wilkins, Crick and Watson were
awarded the Nobel prize for their elucidation of DNA's structure.
Franklin's part was forgotten until she was caricatured in Watson's
book The Double Helix. In this full and balanced biography
Brenda Maddox has been given unique access to Rosalind's personal
correspondence and has interviewed all the principal scientists
involved, including Crick, Watson and Wilkins. (Brenda Maddox,
Harper Collins, ISBN 0 00 257149 8) |
Brenda
Maddox, Rosalind Franklin (HarperCollins)
Available
from Amazon Books (order below)
