The Secret of Life, page 9
FROM EARLY 1949 through most of 1950, Franklin made plans to return to England. She loved working at the labo but it was time to get on with her life in England. Writing to her parents in March 1950, she told them the projected move home was “much harder that leaving London to come here, because the break will be more permanent.”70 In 1949, she applied to work at Birkbeck College, London, under J. D. Bernal, one of the world’s leading crystallographers. Bernal rejected both Franklin and one other applicant, a physicist from the Admiralty Research Office named Francis Crick.
In March 1950, Franklin had tea with a theoretical chemist named Charles Coulson, whom she had met during her BCURA days. He was now working at King’s College. Coulson introduced her to John Randall, who was impressed by the young woman’s credentials. At the time, Randall desperately needed to fill several staff vacancies. He was short of well-trained “senior people” and worried about meeting the many obligations required to keep his MRC grant running on track; this was a factor in his frustration at Wilkins’s fumblings with the X-ray equipment. Randall was most charming when attracting a new performer for his circus, and he turned it on while recruiting Franklin. Unfortunately, he made the colossally wrong assumption that Franklin, whom he deemed to be a quiet and reserved woman, would be a perfect fit for the King’s Biophysics Unit.
Rosalind Franklin in Cabane des Evettes, taking a break from a mountain climb, c. 1950.
Her application for the postdoctoral fellowship at King’s was written after much consultation with her prospective boss. The original research plan called for the “X-ray diffraction study of protein solutions and the changes in structure which accompany the denaturing of proteins.”71 In June 1950, she interviewed for a three-year Turner and Newall Fellowship, paying £750 a year, which she formally accepted on July 7. Although the fellowship typically began in the fall, Franklin requested to begin work at King’s College on January 1, 1951 “so that she may complete some research that she is doing in Paris.”72
ON DECEMBER 4, 1950, Randall wrote Franklin a letter dictating an entirely new course of research for the months ahead. This communication set in motion what can only be considered as one of the greatest human resource snafus in the history of science. Randall’s letter merits quoting at length because it serves as an oracle of what would soon go so terribly wrong between Franklin and Maurice Wilkins:
The real difficulty has been that the X-ray work is in a somewhat fluid state and the slant on the research has changed rather since you were last here.
After very careful consideration and discussion with the senior people concerned, it now seems it would be a good deal more important for you to investigate the structure of certain biological fibers in which we are interested, both by high and low angle diffractions, rather than to continue with the original project of work on solutions as the major one.
Dr. Stokes, as I have long inferred, really wishes to concern himself almost entirely with theoretical problems in the future and these will not necessarily be confined to X-ray optics. This means that as far as the experimental X-ray effort is concerned there will be at the moment only yourself and Gosling, together with the temporary assistance of a graduate from Syracuse, Mrs. [Louise] Heller. Gosling, working in conjunction with Wilkins, has already found that fibers of deoxyribose nucleic acid derived from material provided by Professor Signer of Bern gives remarkable good fiber diagrams. The fibers are strongly negatively birefringent and become positive on stretching and are reversible in a moist atmosphere. As you no doubt know, nucleic acid is an extremely important constituent of cells and it seems to us that would be very valuable if this could be followed up in detail [italics added]. If you are agreeable to this change of plan it would seem that there is no necessity immediately to design a camera for work on solutions. The camera will, however, be extremely valuable for large spacings from such fibers.
I hope you will understand that I am not in this way suggesting that we should give up all thought of work on solutions, but we do feel that work on fibers would be more immediately profitable and, perhaps, fundamental.73
TO HIS LAST DAY ON EARTH, Maurice Wilkins claimed not to have seen Randall’s December 4, 1950, letter to Franklin until years after her death. Clinging to this tall tale, he obsessively tried to paper over the wrongs he committed against a colleague whose martyrdom has only grown exponentially in the years since. The files of every historian and journalist who interviewed him are filled with corrective letters from Wilkins after reading their books and manuscripts.
This much we do know: Wilkins left the lab for his winter holiday on December 5, one day after the Randall letter was typed, signed, and dated. For nearly a week, he was hiking in the Welsh mountains with an artist named Edel Lange, wooing her with romantic walks under the “mild winter sun” and long evenings of reading Jane Austen together.74 Just before his trip, Wilkins contended, he had developed “a clear crystalline X-ray pattern” of DNA. While out on his “short holiday,” he decided he “must give up completely the microscope work and concentrate full-time on X-ray structure analysis of DNA,” even though he makes no note of ever informing Randall of this decision until well after he returned from his winter vacation.75
Once back at King’s, Wilkins unfurled his self-admitted, old-fashioned views about the subservience of women, whether in marriage or the workplace. Despite Franklin’s doctorate and years of independent research experience, Wilkins assumed that she was hired to serve as his research assistant. James Watson later propagated this misunderstanding in print when he wrote that “She claimed that she had been given DNA for her own problem and would not think of herself as Maurice’s assistant … The real problem, then, was Rosy. The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person’s lab.”76
When speaking with Franklin’s biographer Brenda Maddox in 2000, Wilkins admitted that his alibi of not knowing anything about Randall’s “Rosalind letter” appeared dubious, given that he was the assistant director of the laboratory and should have been abreast of all hiring issues.77 On other occasions, Wilkins went so far as to take credit for hiring Franklin, as if that should have earned him some type of gratitude in return. On February 6, 1951, one month after Franklin’s arrival at King’s, Wilkins wrote to Roy Markham at the Molteno Institute at Cambridge, “We now have Miss Franklin for X-ray work and hope to get something really done, as almost no progress was made since the summer.”78 In 2000, Wilkins told Brenda Maddox he “believed he was instrumental in getting Rosalind assigned to DNA. When he heard from Randall that she was coming to work on proteins in solution, he thought it a waste as they were getting such good results on nucleic acids. Considering her X-ray expertise, why not, he suggested, ‘grab her and get her in on the DNA work?’ To his surprise, Randall readily agreed.” Such statements fail to support his adamancy about not knowing the precise terms of her appointment at the lab.79
Nonetheless, in his 2003 memoir, Wilkins made certain to deflect the blame entirely onto Randall. He insisted that his boss was completely in the wrong in having told Franklin that his and Stokes’s X-ray work on DNA had ended without so much as consulting them. Wilkins accused Randall of wanting to take over the work himself, with Franklin reporting directly to him. Calling his former boss “ruthless,” Wilkins insisted, “If Randall had not barged in, it might even have been that Rosalind could have worked happily alongside Stokes and me, and her professional X-ray approach could have combined fruitfully with our techniques and theorizing.”80 But Wilkins also had the humility, too late to be sure, to record his admiration at Franklin’s ability to conduct her work even “when our Head of Department’s secret letter was so clearly contradicted by the reality of me and Stokes giving no sign of moving off DNA. It must have been a great burden to her, and I continue to be impressed by her fortitude.”81
Perhaps the employment arrangements at King’s are best left discussed by the man who actually did the hiring. In 1970, Sir John Randall sat for an interview with Anne Sayre. She described him as “a tit-tuppy-type given to ‘oh dears.’” On the one hand, he claimed full responsibility for the misunderstandings that developed between Franklin and Wilkins, but on the other, he immediately excused himself because he had “his hands full” administering a large laboratory. Sayre recorded that Randall “did not in any way remember Rosalind kindly, though he quite astonished me in remarking how good-looking she was. His feelings are very colored (and he admits this freely) by the fact he feels certain that if Rosalind and Wilkins had worked together, they would have brought out the DNA structure ahead of Cambridge. … He says this failure was a ‘tragedy,’ and blames it on Rosalind more than Wilkins but ‘Wilkins may in some ways be a bit difficult.’” Without prompting, Randall emphatically added, “at no time was Rosalind Wilkins ‘assistant’, as Watson said … she was an independent worker and was in no way subject to Wilkins.”82 Sadly, Randall’s declamations of quasi-support were made two decades after the fact. In the moment that was December 4, 1951, he failed miserably.
[ 7 ]
There Was No One Like Linus in All the World
The combination of his prodigious mind and his infectious grin was unbeatable. Several fellow professors, however, watched this performance with mixed feelings. Seeing Linus jumping up and down on the demonstration table and moving his arms like a magician about to pull a rabbit out of his shoe made them feel inadequate. If only he had shown a little humility, it would have been so much easier to take! Even if he were to say nonsense, his mesmerized students would never know because of his unquenchable self-confidence. A number of his colleagues quietly watched for the day when he would fall flat on his face by botching something important.
—JAMES D. WATSON1
Just as physicists were using quantum theory to reshape biology, Linus Pauling proposed doing the same for chemistry.2 In 1936, at the age of thirty-five, he was named the chairman of chemistry and director of the division of chemistry and chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology. With a river of dollars steered his way from the Rockefeller Foundation, Pauling had all the resources he needed to merge chemistry, biology, and physics into the new discipline of “molecular biology—which [was just] beginning to uncover many of the secrets concerning the ultimate units of the living cell.”3 It was a wise investment of titles and resources to make. A cursory review of his research during this period is breathtaking: it ranges from developing new methods to study the structure of inorganic and organic molecules to co-authoring an important textbook on the application of quantum theory to chemistry.4 While pursuing these tasks, Pauling set his piercing, steel-blue eyes on an entirely new scientific vista: determining the structure of proteins, the building blocks of all living beings. Succeeding in such a Himalayan endeavor, he posited, would help scientists and physicians better understand the daily functions of life; it might also contain the keys to the heretofore locked box of genetics.5 This was, to say the least, an understatement.
LINUS CARL PAULING WAS born in Condon, Oregon on February 28, 1901.6 His father, Herman Pauling, was a druggist who long suffered from poor business sense and debilitating stomach aches. As a little boy, Linus loved watching his father mix and compound his own dyspepsia treatments. After his drugstore in Condon burned down, in 1909, Herman moved the family to Portland. He died the following year, from a perforated ulcer and peritonitis, when he was only thirty-four and Linus was nine. His mother, Lucy Isabelle Darling Pauling, had few skills outside of homemaking and parenting Linus and his two young sisters, Pauline and Frances. Their economic situation grew so dire that Mrs. Pauling began to eke out a living by running a small boardinghouse in Portland for itinerant travelers. Money remained tight, Mrs. Pauling was often ill, and Linus had to help supplement the family coffers with a variety of odd jobs. In between school and chores, he clocked marathon hours at the county public library, reading books of all kinds and topics. He routinely amazed his teachers not only with an ability to memorize whatever he read but also in applying the content to the lessons taught in school.
When Pauling was fourteen, his best friend received a toy chemistry set and the two boys played with it nonstop. He “was simply entranced by chemical phenomena, by the reactions in which substances, often with strikingly different properties, appear; and [he] hoped to learn more and more about this aspect of the world.”7 Soon after, he created his own basement laboratory with chemicals, glassware, and reagents he liberated from an abandoned smelter where his grandfather worked as a security guard. As with Francis Crick’s boyhood antics, most of Pauling’s chemical output was limited to making stink bombs and explosive firecrackers. To supplement his laboratory hijinks, he began borrowing chemistry texts from the library to learn how different substances changed when mixed with others and, more broadly, the composition of matter.
At sixteen, Pauling set his sights on a degree in chemical engineering from the Oregon Agricultural College in Corvallis, a practical goal that he hoped would feed his curiosity and lead to stable employment. OAC was especially attractive because it offered free tuition for in-state students. There was one significant problem with him moving 72 miles southwest to Corvallis: his mother desperately needed the wages he earned from his after-school machine shop job, so she demanded that he continue working and abandon his academic ambitions. Pauling held his ground, however; he dropped out of high school and soon afterward was accepted at OAC.
He matriculated in the fall of 1917 but temporarily left college in 1919 to help out at home by taking a job as a road paving inspector for the state of Oregon. Fortunately, the eighteen-year-old was so brilliant at chemistry and oratory that upon his return the college offered him a full-time position as an assistant instructor in quantitative analysis. He could now live and learn in Corvallis and send a healthy portion of his income to his mother in Portland.
During his senior year, Pauling met the love of his life, Ava Helen Miller, a bright, pretty, flirtatious freshman with long black hair. He later recalled the reason behind his infatuation, “she was smarter than any girl I’d ever met.” Hailing from Beaver Creek, Oregon, Ava Helen was the tenth of twelve children of a German immigrant schoolteacher, whose liberal Democratic Party views tended toward socialism, and a mother active in the suffrage movement. Ava Helen had a wide array of interests, ranging from women’s rights, racial equality, and social reform to chemistry. They met while she was taking his “Chemistry of Home Economics” course. At first, Pauling was hesitant to ask her on a date, because romantic relationships with students were discouraged among the faculty. Love conquered bureaucracy after he convinced himself that a more accurate description of their relationship was not that of the coed and the boy professor but rather one between two students. He courted Ava Helen during long walks together, sharing bags of sea foam candy, and at school dances. In late spring of 1922, before giving her final grade, he asked her to become his wife. After she accepted his proposal, he marked her final grade down one point lest he be accused of showing favoritism to his fiancée.8 They married in the spring of 1923 and embarked upon a sixty-year partnership of family, ideas, science, and activist politics. While Pauling would win the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize for his work against nuclear proliferation, it was his wife who had first introduced him to the peace movement.
Linus Pauling and Ava Helen Miller, 1922.
Upon graduating from OAC, Pauling matriculated into the PhD program of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, a newly reconfigured school of science and engineering, rich in endowment money, pathbreaking research, and Nobel Prize winners. Caltech remained his academic home for the next forty years.9 As a doctoral student, he gravitated toward the topics of X-ray crystallography, quantum theory, and atomic structure. In 1925, he completed his dissertation, “The Determination with X-rays of the Structure of Crystals,” under the supervision of Roscoe Dickinson, who, in 1920, had earned the first PhD granted by Caltech. The following year, 1926, the department chairman Arthur Noyes pulled strings to win Pauling a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a program for brilliant scholars of all stripes established in 1925.10
Pauling used those funds to travel to Munich with his wife, where he took a visiting post at Arnold Sommerfeld’s Institute of Theoretical Physics. Sommerfeld was a pioneer in quantum physics and trained several doctoral students who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics or Chemistry, including Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and Wolfgang Pauli.11 At the institute, Pauling met some of Europe’s most prominent physicists and chemists and they, in turn, introduced him to their research. Although theoretical physics was never his métier, Pauling was convinced that quantum theory was the key to understanding the “structure and behavior of molecules,” atoms, and the chemical bonds holding them together.12 The Guggenheim Foundation granted additional funds so the Paulings could travel to Copenhagen, where he visited Niels Bohr’s famed physics institute and briefly experienced Der Kopenhagener Geist der Quantentheorie (the Copenhagen spirit of quantum theory), an ethos of intellectual collaboration in the development of modern atomic physics.13
PAULING RETURNED TO CALTECH in the fall of 1927 as an assistant professor of theoretical chemistry. His rise was meteoric and by 1930, at age twenty-nine, he was a full professor. In 1931, a German physicist who was being recruited for a position at Caltech sat in on one of Pauling’s lectures. The topic was the application of wave mechanics to understanding chemical bonds. When asked by a newspaper reporter what he thought of the lecture, the physicist demurred, saying, “It was too complicated for me,” and he promised to “brush up on the subject” before “again trying to engage the young Dr. Pauling in a conversation.” The visitor was Albert Einstein.14 That same year, Arthur Noyes described the young scientist as “a rising star, who may yet win the Nobel Prize.”15 By 1933, at thirty-two, Pauling was well on his way to such an accolade; that autumn, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors bestowed upon American scientists.
