The unsung woman behind a Nobel Prize
The philosopher of science Evelyn Fox Keller once remarked that if a woman scientist hopes to win a Nobel Prize, she had better plan on living a very long time. Rosalind Franklin, unwisely, died at 37, putting her out of the running when, four years later, her colleague Maurice Wilkins, along with James Watson and Francis Crick, was awarded a Nobel for discovering the structure of DNA. Franklin’s impeccable X-ray photographs provided the data on which Watson and Crick built their ideas, and Franklin herself was already on track to deciphering DNA. Few experts today doubt that her name also should be on the Nobel roster.
Her death, however, saved the Swedish Academy of Sciences from a sticky situation, for Nobel rules stipulate that each award can be shared by only three people. Franklin had a prickly relationship with all three men, who coveted her data but viewed her as a bluestockinged harridan. Moreover, as the only woman among the four, her chances for a nomination were probably poor, even had she lived. In the history of the Nobels, only 10 women have been honored with one of the science prizes, of which there are three categories: medicine or physiology, physics, and chemistry. Rosalind Franklin would not have been the first to suffer from Nobel chauvinism. Fortunately for the academy, she was dead, and so the problem never arose.
April 2003 marks the 50th anniversary of Watson and Crick’s momentous announcement that DNA is a tightly coiled helical ladder whose rungs encode the language of life. Big celebrations are being planned, and the three laureates will no doubt be lauded in style. Though absent from the proceedings, I suspect that Franklin’s spirit will be much invoked by all parties, as eager to assuage their own sense of guilt as to pay homage to this singular woman. Which is to say that half a century and a feminist revolution later, Rosalind Franklin is finally getting the recognition she deserves. Not the least of her tributes, and surely not the last, is Brenda Maddox’s cannily timed biography.
Happily for readers, Maddox eschews the hagiographic path. In her opening pages, she notes that Franklin has often been presented as “the Sylvia Plath of biology, the woman whose gifts were sacrificed to the greater glory of the male.” This mythologizing, though “intended to be reparative,” has, in Maddox’s view, “done her no favors.” Here Maddox aims to set the record straight with an account of a complex, determined and, yes, at times difficult woman.
Like many women scientists of the early 20th century, Franklin came from a Jewish family in which a love of learning was deeply ingrained. Her father was a London banker, but several nights a week he poured his own thwarted scientific interests into the Working Man’s College, where he taught classes in magnetism, electricity and the history of the Great War. At the age of 12, Rosalind announced her intention of becoming a scientist. Nonetheless, and it is critical to understanding her, she always suffered from a sense that in her parents’ eyes, her brothers came first. Beneath her apparent confidence, Rosalind Franklin was plagued by nagging self-doubt.
In 1938, Franklin was accepted to Cambridge University after topping the entrance examination in chemistry (she of course worried that she’d failed). Cambridge had admitted women to its classes since 1869, and Jews since 1871, but in the 1930s, the university still did not grant degrees to women. Like other female students of her day, Franklin received hers years after she graduated. Trained in physics and chemistry, she first made a name for herself as an expert on the microstructure of coal. That led to an interest in the emerging field of X-ray crystallography, at which she proved a dab hand, and in 1950 she was offered a job at Kings College in London to apply this technique to DNA.
So used are we to hearing about DNA’s central role in the chemistry of life that it is hard to imagine this understanding was ever in doubt. But in the early ‘50s, many scientists thought proteins were the crucial molecules. Deoxyribonucleic acid was clearly important -- there were masses of the stuff in every cell nucleus -- but what did it do? One of the more radical concepts evolving at the time was the idea that the structure of an organic molecule might in some way determine its function. If scientists could work out the structure of DNA, perhaps they would gain an insight into what purpose it served. In the biophysics department at Kings College, J.T. Randall, an eminent physicist and British war hero, decided that DNA’s structure was a problem worth solving, and he hired Franklin to do the job.
During the 27 months Franklin spent at Kings, she focused her attention on DNA, honing her crystallography skills to produce the clearest and most precise X-ray diffraction images of the enigmatic molecule. Unlike regular photography, which shows us the shape of the object itself, X-ray diffraction reveals the pattern of rays scattered by the object. From this pattern, the shape of the actual object must then be deduced. In Franklin’s now-famous Photo 51 was clear evidence for DNA’s helical structure.
“The instant I saw the picture, my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” James Watson later wrote in “The Double Helix,” his own saucy account of his and Crick’s discovery, published in 1968. Many people already suspected that DNA had a helical form, but Franklin’s images provided the solid data from which the precise structure could be determined. The most important question was how many helical strands might be involved. Watson and Crick had initially proposed a three-stranded model, as did Linus Pauling, another Nobel laureate. Using Franklin’s data, which had been surreptitiously given to them by her colleague Maurice Wilkins, Watson and Crick were at last able to piece together the correct two-stranded model.
Moreover, Watson and Crick realized that this elegant double spiral suggested in its structure a copying mechanism for genetic material. As the two helixes unzip, each becomes a template for another copy. Function was indeed encoded in form. For this step alone, Watson and Crick justly deserve the accolades they received. But without Franklin’s data, as Watson himself has admitted, they would not have been able to get there.
But a question lingers: Why didn’t Franklin take the theoretical initiative? Why didn’t she discern the double helix model herself? Maddox’s poignant and pithy biography might be seen as an attempt to get to the heart of this conundrum, and here I think she does justice to her subject as only the best biographers can.
Franklin was trained to be cautious. Everything in her personality and upbringing rebelled against what Maddox incisively terms “an outrageous leap of the imagination.” It is clear that Franklin did recognize in her data the potential for a helical structure, yet she believed that a scientist should not act on intuition and insisted on amassing all the facts before making any public avowal. James Watson, on the other hand, was all outrageous imagination. Certain of his own genius, Watson was convinced that whoever discovered the structure of DNA would write his (or her) name in history, and he wasn’t about to sit around and wait to be scooped. He trusted his intuition implicitly.
The differences between Franklin and Watson -- the former meticulous and cautious, painstakingly gathering data to build up an unimpeachable case; the latter rushing headlong into wild speculation -- define two poles of the scientific character. For much of history, the former qualities were revered as the ideal, but during the 20th century, the latter came to the fore. In that sense, Rosalind Franklin was definitively the old-fashioned type. Maddox’s book, though ostensibly a biography of an individual, is an exploration of the changing nature of science itself and, above all, of what is required for success in the field. In Watson’s bull-at-a-gate style, we can see the template for a more recent scientific achievement, the sequencing of the human genome. Here the go-getter was maverick geneticist J. Craig Venter, who by sheer force of ego pushed the project to resolution years ahead of schedule. Expect his name on a Nobel medal some time soon.
Next April, Watson and Crick and Wilkins will stand on podiums around the globe and the world will rightly cheer their achievement. Franklin, whom Watson so dismissively caricatured in “The Double Helix,” will not be there to share the limelight. At the peak of her career, having already made significant contributions to three separate fields of science, she died of ovarian cancer, very likely induced by overexposure to x-rays in the course of her research. The true tragedy here, as Maddox notes in her final pages, is not the absence of a Nobel but the premature termination of a brilliant career: “The lost prize was life.”
