Rosalind Franklin, the woman who was robbed of the title of "discoverer of the structure of DNA" and with it the Nobel Prize, became a feminist symbol, the Sylvia Plath of molecular biology, the woman whose talents were sacrificed for the glorification of the male. Chapter from a new biography about her * The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox. From English: Adi Marcuse-Hess. Philosophy and Science Series. Attic Book Publishers and Yediot Books
Brenda Maddox
The story of Rosalind Franklin, "the dark lady of DNA", is one of the most exciting stories of modern science. A young, brilliant scientist, a woman (and also a Jew), she is the one who was robbed of the title "discoverer of the structure of DNA" and with it the Nobel Prize. Reluctantly, she got caught up in the race among catch-what-you-can scientists, and saw how two of them, James Watson and Francis Crick, who officially did not work on discovering the structure of DNA, win the Nobel Prize for it.
It all started and ended with their short visit to her room and a quick glance at her papers and dozens of hours of hard work and photos. The two immediately realized that someone had discovered something very important and they ran on with this information straight to the Nobel. If it weren't for James Watson's ugly reference to Rosalind Franklin, whom he called "Rosie" and his contempt for her, which was reflected in the early editions of his book "The Double Helix", the story would not have been revealed. His attitude towards her raised in some people in the scientific community the question why he despised her so much? The question led to an investigation that led to hidden diaries and correspondence. The discovery excited not only the scientific community. Rosalind Franklin became a feminist icon, the Sylvia Plath of molecular biology, the woman whose talents were sacrificed for the glorification of the male.
Rosalind Franklin's full-of-life life story comes to an end very early, and suddenly: at the age of 37, she died after a hopeless battle with cancer. This staunch mountain climber, who was just waiting for another vacation to conquer another ridge, falls like an aunt only "two steps" away from two wonderful peaks: the discovery of the structure of DNA - and falling in real love with a man, something she did not know all her life. She left behind, in addition to an impressive crop of 37 brilliant scientific articles, an incredible mixture of conflicting emotions among those who survived: love and admiration from students and colleagues, those who were very close to her, as opposed to anger and hostility - but also feelings of guilt - among those who did not like her And beware of her "bad injury". Watson apparently did not get rid of his feelings of guilt towards her for many years.
Brenda Maddox is an award-winning biographer, and her books have been translated into many languages. Among other things, she was the chairperson of the "British Science Writers' Association", and today she is a member of the executive board of the "Royal Association for Science and Society" in Great Britain. The chapter presented here is the tenth in her book "Rosalind Frankin - The Dark Lady of DNA".
Eureka, and peace to all (January 6-March 16, 1953)
"Of course, Rosie didn't directly give us her data. In fact, no one at Kings was aware that they were in our possession."
James Watson, "The Double Helix"
The secret of life, which was four billion years old, became the target of disturbing probing in a drama that unfolded every day, almost hourly, during the first seven weeks of 1953. The heralding news that Linus Pauling and Robert Corey had solved the puzzle of DNA's structure triggered the stopwatch On January 6, Rosalind, who somehow got the news, wrote to Corey at Caltech and asked him for details of the discovery. They had been corresponding since May, when Corey admired her "wonderful X-ray photographs of nucleic acid fibers".
Her notebooks show very vigorous activity throughout the month of January. She began to think of building a model herself, of the A shape, which would be based on her Patterson calculations. Do the calculations represent a shape of the figure eight—two windings crossing each other in the center? Or maybe two paired rods? She knew about the Chargaff relationship and tried to push the four bases of DNA into a structure where the phosphates are on the outside. They didn't get along in the structure. Still engrossed in her thoughts on the contradictions found between form A and form B, she was willing to accept the idea that form B was a double-stranded helix, but continued to question this about the second form. Aron Klug, who worked with her in a later period, commented on this some time later: "The phase Franklin was in in those days is a phase well known to many researchers. This is the stage where seemingly contradictory or irreconcilable observations are pushed aside and compete with each other for the attention of the researcher, who does not know how to choose between them and which one is the key with which he will be able to solve the puzzle."
She was after a week's work when Peter Pauling returned to Cambridge from his holiday break in Germany and Austria. On January 13, he wrote to his father and asked him for a copy of his article he had written with Corey on DNA, adding that the Medical Research Council unit in Cavendish was also interested in a copy. He prefaced the request with a joke:
You know how children are threatened, "If you are not good, a monster will come and take you away". Here in Cambridge, Francis and the rest have been threatening the nucleic acid people at King's for over a year, "If you don't work hard, Pauling will start getting interested in nucleic acids."
Poling sent the article, confident that he could once again beat Lawrence Bragg, his old rival from Cavendish. In fact, he sent to England two copies of "A Proposal for the Structure of Nucleic Acids", one to Peter and one to Bragg. Peter wrote in reply, "We were all excited by the structure of the nucleic acids. Thank you very much for the article. The second sunny day since I arrived in England."
As far as is known, the article arrived on January 28 and it did stir up excitement in Cavendish. When Peter brought the article to the lab, Jim Watson could only barely restrain himself from snatching it from Peter's hands. He held back, listening impatiently to Peter's words, and finally tore it from his coat pocket and read it alone. He immediately saw that the structure Pauling proposed—a three-stranded helix (as the chains were called) with their phosphates in the center—was very similar to the incorrect model he and Francis Crick had built in November 1951. Worse—or better, from Watson's point of view—Pauling had made a fatal chemical mistake. The phosphates were not ionized—that is, Pauling did not take into account the electrical charges that phosphates have when they are in an aqueous environment. The structure he proposed for the nucleic acid was not an acid at all.
Pauling made this stupid mistake because he was in a hurry. but why? Many speculations have been raised about the question of why one of the world's greatest chemists, the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Science, the author of the book that has become the classic text on the nature of the chemical bond, should have risked his good name and rushed to publish a carelessly written article that proposed a flawed idea. According to one opinion, after cracking the protein structure Pauling also wanted the credit for solving the other half of the cell's secrets. According to another opinion, despite all the honors he won, he was rushed because he never won a Nobel Prize. Pauling himself later said that his wife asked him one day why he was unable to decipher the riddle, and that after pondering a bit he answered her, "I guess I always thought that the DNA structure was my problem, that I would solve it, that's why I didn't attack it with all my might."
Watson's joy over the error was tempered by the news that Poling's article would soon be published in the February issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The mistake will be discovered immediately, and Poling will return to the race track without delay. Watson felt that he and Crick had a breathing space of about six weeks.
In addition, on January 28, Rosalind lectured at her farewell seminar from Kings. Maurice Wilkins thought she was exaggerating; He tilted his ear and strained to hear the word "coil", but he didn't hear it. Herbert Wilson, who took notes during the lecture, did not hear it either. She did not refer to the B form of DNA, nor did she show the wonderful photograph numbered 51, and instead concentrated on her and Gosling's recent experimental work, which revealed that the A form of DNA is not a helix.
At the end of that month, J.T. noticed Randall is a completely unnecessary guest for him in the Kings - Jim Watson. It seemed to him that the clumsy young American from Cavendish kept popping up at King's College London. One morning Randall walked into the coffee club that met every day in Angela Brown's room, and found Watson there, smiling broadly. "Here is the bishop of St. Paul," he blurted out with a grin. Randall's bloated Christmas letter to the Times was the subject of general hilarity in the lab.
No one ever spoke that way to the inventor of the resonance magnetron. Randall was seething with rage. As soon as Watson left he roared: "I don't want to see this man ever again". But even if Watson was out of sight, he wasn't out of mind.
Rosalind didn't like Watson's looks either. On January 30, the door to her office opened and he entered. The only published version of what happened there comes from Watson. This is a key scene in his book The Double Helix:
Since the door was not completely closed, I opened it, peeked in and saw Rosie bent over a light table, busy measuring an X-ray photograph that was placed on it. My sudden entrance made her jump in alarm, but she immediately recovered and calmed down, and her eyes, which looked directly into my face, told me that it was appropriate for uninvited guests to bother knocking on the door.
Watson asked her if she wanted to take a look at Poling's handwriting, and since he got almost no response he hurried to show her the mistake Poling had made. She replied that the evidence in her hands does not support the structure of a coil at all. But Watson had already heard from Wilkins that Rosalind was "absolutely anti-coil"—without either of them ever seeing her findings. (Harry Carlyle, the Birkbeck crystallographer, wrote in his memoirs: "I am convinced by Rosalind's excellent X-ray studies, made on both the A and B forms of DNA, that she was in no way 'anti-helix' at the time, as Watson claimed in The Helix the double"). Watson felt that Rosalind was much more concerned with making positive arguments from the data obtained in her X-ray photographs. He decided in his heart that she did not know what she was talking about:
I knew more about her results than she realized. A few months before, Morris had described to me the nature of her apparently anti-helix results. Since Francis assured me not to be fooled after them, I decided to risk a full explosion. Without further hesitation, I implied that she was incapable of correctly interpreting X-ray photographs. If she had bothered to study a little theory, she would have understood how those seemingly non-helical features are due to secondary distortions caused when the ordered coils are compressed to form the crystal lattice.
Suddenly Rosie came out from behind the laboratory table that separated us and started to move towards me. Fearing that in the heat of her anger she might strike me, I grabbed Poling's article and hurriedly retreated to the open door.
"For fear that in the heat of her anger she might strike me": the blatant absurdity of this remark aroused great contempt. Rosalind was petite and of average height, Watson was a thin, but tall guy, who was more than eighty meters tall. But the male's fear of the female was always unfounded - the strong afraid of the weak - and at the same time absolutely real. To address this fear in the negative means to try to cancel the myth of Medusa, the Wicked Witch of the West, Lilith and the other figures that represent everything that arouses in the male reluctance and repulsion from the female; This is the fear that led even the good-natured research student John Cadogan to say of Rosalind, "She almost scared me to death."
Watson's embarrassment in his dealings with women is well documented in The Double Helix. His attempts to get close to them were imbued with an oppressive insecurity. The women were of only two kinds: prey—"pieces" or "girls or goats"—and idols, such as his aristocratic hostess in Scotland, Naomi Mitchison and her sister Elizabeth. Rosalind was neither this nor that; And worse, she was an angry woman. And there was a reason for her anger. Courtesy demanded that Corey send a copy of his and Poling's DNA article to her, not to Cavendish.
Watson describes Rosalind's "heat of rage" as if it arose spontaneously for no reason at all. It is possible to offer another explanation for her rage - and in fact, for the whole incident. At the beginning of 1953 Rosalind complained, very angry and worried, to a friend of King's, that when she returned to her room one day she realized that someone had read the notes in her notebooks. If Randall and Wilkins see themselves as her bosses, she vented angrily before a man of faith, they should protect her work better. Instead, she knows that Wilkins maintains a continuous and open relationship with the McVandish couple. She also voiced her concerns to an old colleague from the British Coal Utilization Research Association.
She too was immersed in a race against time. Since she was due to move to Birkbeck in mid-March, she rushed as much as she could to finish deciphering the A-form of DNA using Patterson's calculations before leaving King's. She worked hard on three articles (intended to be published in collaboration with Gosling) so that she could deliver them to Randall before she left; His approval is required as a prerequisite for sending the articles to other readers, and of course before their publication.
Two articles were intended for lacta crystallographica. In these articles, she officially informed the world of science about her discoveries made at King's: the existence of two forms of DNA, and the conditions that allow the forms to change from one to the other easily and quickly. She described the DNA molecule. Its phosphate groups were on the outside, exposed and tend to absorb water very easily, which made it very easy to hydrate the molecule and stretch it lengthwise. Protected in this way by an envelope of water, the DNA is "relatively free from the influence of neighboring molecules". To the first article she attached an appendix with incredibly clear X-ray photographs of the two forms. The second paper provided the details of measurements of the X-ray burst pattern obtained from Form A, which she and Gosling had concentrated on for the six months leading up to its writing: a wealth of information of the kind that crystallographers value. The third article, the shortest of them, contained a more general summary of their findings regarding the B form.
While Watson retreated from Rosalind's fury, salvation from the imaginary attack came in the form of Maurice Wilkins, who stuck his head in the bedroom door. Wilkins comforted him that a few months earlier "she had leapt at him in a similar manner" and blocked his way to the door when he wanted to run away. Pouring his heart out in "You see what I have to deal with," Wilkins echoed what Rosalind had said at her 1951 colloquium on the two forms of DNA, and complained that all he had left to work with were the samples given to him by Irwin Chargaff of New York. York, from which it is impossible to derive the transition from A to B. The Zigner fibers that Rosalind had produced much more successful patterns. "She has an excellent B," Wilkins said.
Wilkins didn't know about the superb explosion photo number 51, taken eight months earlier, until Gosling brought it in and showed it to him that January. Gosling, preparing to complete his thesis without Rosalind's guidance, had good reason to show what was also his work to the assistant head of the department. "Maurice had every right to have that information," Gosling said in retrospect. "So many things were done at Kings before Rosalind arrived." Both he and Wilkins knew that the DNA research would continue after she left the lab.
Wilkins, carelessly, showed photograph 51 to Watson. Many X-ray photographs of DNA were scattered around the lab; It was the best of all. Since the information in it was not new to Wilkins - Rosalind mentioned a considerable part of the details in her colloquium in 1951 - it never occurred to him that he would act on Watson with such great power of discovery. He also had no idea that Watson was planning to try his hand at building another model of DNA.
But Watson was now wiser than he had been in late 1951, when he failed miserably at building his first model. A year of work on the tobacco mosaic virus had trained him, as had reading the Cochrane-Crick-Wand paper on coils. Now he was able to recognize at a glance the significance of Rosalind's photographed image: strikingly clear evidence of a spiral shape, with distinguishable measures of angles of inclination and spacing. He almost did not exaggerate when he wrote in the double helix book: "Immediately when I saw the photograph, my mouth opened wide and my heart began to beat wildly."
DNA coil (photo: Getty Imagebank)
That evening the two men dined together at a restaurant in Soho. Wilkins wanted to talk about Chargaff relationships and the possibility that they hold the key to the structure of DNA. Watson, however, insisted on hearing about numbers that could match the pattern he had just seen. The repeat (the length of one turn of the helix) of form B was 34.4 angstroms—a measure ten times greater than the distance separating the bases stacked on top of each other, which is 3.4 angstroms. On the train, on his way back to Cambridge, Watson sketched the pattern from memory on the only paper he had, the margin of his newspaper. The drawing was simple and clear and easily fit into the narrow space of the margin. In his mind was still nested the thought that it is possible that the molecule has three helical chains. As he cycled home from the station, rolling over the photograph of Rosalind with the dark cross shape in his head, he decided there were only two chains there. "Francis will have to agree," he wrote later. "Even though he was only a physicist, he knew that important objects in biology appear in pairs." (According to Crick, the argument was a bit more complex).
From that day, events unfolded rapidly. The next day, January 31, Bragg released Watson and Crick from the boycott. He agreed to Watson's request to order metal components from the workshop to start building models again. With Linus Pauling's article in hand, Bragg was not about to repeat the biggest mistake of his life once more. At Cavendish they probably thought: "We've missed the fibrous proteins once. Now Poling is about to capture the DNA as well."
When Rosalind began her attempt to create a model for the A shape, she realized that the structures she created, of paired rods, did not work. She therefore moved on to try a figure 8 model, where a single chain forms a single long column of repeating 8 shapes. But on Monday, February 2, she also ruled out the figure 8 shape.
On Wednesday, February 4, Watson began building the model. His initial drawing, based on Rosalind's photograph 51, was to Crick a confirmation that they were using the correct numbers needed to assemble the B-form model: a diameter of Å 20, a vertical distance between two bases of Å 3.4, a repeat length of Å 34 and an angle of inclination The coil is about 40 degrees. Although Crick was still not entirely convinced that there were not three chains, Watson stuck to only two. Once again, the controversial phosphate groups served as the pivot, ignoring Rosalind's 1951 claim that these water-attracting groups must be on the outside of the molecule. Crick repeated the dialogue showing the team's work in action: "'Why not build models with the phosphates outside?', I said to Jim one evening, 'Because it would be too easy,' he replied (he meant to say that there are too many models to build so). 'Then why don't we try?', I said."
Watson agreed. Crick's second fateful action on February 4 was to invite Wilkins to Cambridge for Sunday lunch. Wilkins answered in the affirmative and added innocently, "I intend to tell you everything I remember and what I scribbled from Rosie's words."
On Sunday, February 8, Wilkins arrived at lunch and learned that the Crick family had two more guests, curious listeners: Watson and Peter Pauling. When the three men urged him to start building models to get ahead of Linus, Wilkins vowed to do so as soon as Rosalind gave way. Watson and Crick forced him to agree that they themselves could go back and try their hand at it - without telling him that they had actually already started doing so. Wilkins suddenly felt that he was in an awkward situation and was early to leave and return to London. Maybe he said too much?
Perhaps so, for sometime during the following week Watson and Crick obtained the Medical Research Council's report on the Biophysics Committee's visit to King's in December. It was given to them by their colleague at Cavendish, Max Perutz, who was a member of the committee. The question of whether Max gave them the report on his own initiative, or if he only gave it in response to an explicit request from one of them, was at the center of ongoing disagreements over the years, as its importance to their efforts became clearer. Perutz wrote in his defense in the journal Science in 1969: "I was inexperienced and not careful in administrative matters, and since the report was not confidential, I saw no point in hiding it."
The Council's report was everything Watson and Crick had hoped for—as valuable as an enemy's code book in war. The section on Rosalind's work explained the change from one form of DNA to another, and detailed, in a neat little table, the dimensions of the "face-centered monoclinic unit cell" (...) "with certainty".
chapter number
The Origin of the Species - a book that won a biography / ynet
Few are the books that have won because a book will be written about them. A list of select books worthy of this honor must include Darwin's Origin of Species. Janet Brown did write a biography of the book, which is now being published in a Hebrew translation. Here is the first episode
To the full article
One glance at the table was enough for Crick's information-laden mind to translate Rosalind's information into the recognition that the crystalline form of DNA belongs to a space group known as "monoclinic C2". In other words, the DNA crystal looks exactly the same even if you turn it upside down. Crick immediately perceived that this meant that one chain of the two coils was directed upwards, and the other - downwards; The chains are anti-parallel, like two escalators, which are parallel to each other but one of them goes up and the other goes down. Watson needed further persuasion, but had to accept Crick's more grounded decision: "C2 monoclinic crystal" was exactly the space group Crick was working on as part of his thesis on horse hemoglobin.
That week, on February 10, Rosalind wrote in her notebook: "Structure B: Evidence for a 2-chain (or 1-chain) helix?" She did some calculations on photograph 49, then put the B shape aside for two weeks. She had to finish her two articles for Acta Crystallographica and transfer them to the printer. (These articles were probably completed a short time later, as they were received by the linguistic editor on March 6, for publication towards the end of the summer).
Pauling and Corey's article was published in the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences on its scheduled date, in February. Their proposal for the structure of DNA may have been completely wrong, but their explanation of the importance of DNA was excellent: "The importance of nucleic acids, as components of living organisms, is comparable to that of proteins. There is evidence that they are involved in the processes of cell division and growth, and that they take part in the transmission of hereditary traits and are important components in the structure of viruses. Understanding the molecular structure of nucleic acids is of great value in the effort to understand the fundamental phenomena of life."
To cover themselves from their British side, Poling and Corey also sent a letter to the journal Nature, which appeared on February 11, announcing their proposed structure. Rosalind could see from this letter—if she hadn't already seen it during Watson's traumatic visit three weeks earlier—that Poling had misplaced the phosphates. She wrote to Poling and informed him of this. It took courage on the part of a 32-year-old "research associate" to correct the words of the international authority, but she was sure of her facts. She explained why the data she had indicated that the phosphate groups must be on the outside, not in the center of the molecule. She also mentioned, as if talking to a co-worker, that three of her articles were about to be published and were only awaiting Randall's final approval.
Pauling was still convinced that he was right. He was working without the fine-focus X-ray equipment and without the pure DNA that Rosalind had, relying on Astbury's pre-war X-ray burst patterns, in which the A and B forms overlapped, one on top of the other. Nevertheless, he politely promised to try to meet with Rosalind when he arrived in England (after he finally managed to get his passport back). However, in a letter to Peter he admitted that when he was in London he would much rather meet Pauline Cowan, whom he had met in Oxford. He does not remember if he ever saw Miss Franklin, but he heard last summer that she was going to leave King's; Corey has a very good opinion of Wilkins. Linus passed on the news to his son that Rosalind was working on three articles on DNA. And as for its structure, he can see that it's "holding up pretty tight," but he and Corey have gone back and retested it and they expect things to work out eventually.
Two chains, yes, but what holds them together? If the phosphates are on the outside of the molecule, the four bases that are always present in DNA must be pushed inside, somewhere between the chains. The problem was that each of the four - the two purines, adenine and guanine, and the two pyrimidines, thymine and cytosine (which are commonly abbreviated as A, G, T, C) - has a different structure.
By mid-February, Watson was struggling with this problem. He tried different combinations and for this he used pieces of cardboard that he cut into different shapes, because the metal plates had not yet arrived from the workshop. First, on February 19, he tried to pair them using the dumme-with-dumme method (purine-purine and pyrimidine-pyrimidine): the pairs thus formed were either too small or too large in relation to the diameter of the molecule specified in Rosalind's table for the council. Then he tried pairing a purine with a pyrimidine — A with T and C with G. But they still didn't work out.
At another desk in room 103 sat a former student of Pauling's, Jerry Donohue. Donoyu watched Watson, who looked like he was trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle, and told Watson he thought he was using the wrong pieces. The bases can exist in two chemically different forms: one is called "keto", and unlike the other form - "enol" - it has one free oxygen atom to form bonds. Why aren't you using a keto diet? Donoyu asked. Because J.M.'s book Davidson, The Biochemistry of Nucleic Acids, Watson replied, and virtually all other books, show the bases in the enol form. The books are wrong, Donoiu said simply. As a chemist, he updated Watson with the news that "enol is out and keto is in".
On the last Monday of the month, February 23, Rosalind took photograph 51, apparently after completing her articles for Acta Crystallographica, and began careful measurements of form B. The next day she concluded that both forms, A and B, were double-stranded helices. "Almost at the end of the road", wrote Aron Klug in his analysis of her notebooks years later.
It occurred to her that it was possible to explain Chargaff's relationships—the fact that DNA always contains an equal number of A molecules to that of T molecules, and an equal number of G molecules to that of C—by the fact that adenine and guanine can be interchanged, as can thymine and cytosine. This possibility, that the similar bases are interchangeable, inspired her vision that "an infinite variety of nucleotide sequences could explain the biological specificity of DNA".
"The concept of base exchange is of course a long way from the truth that was finally found, the phenomenon of base pairing," admits Klug. She was two steps away from the solution. Crick ventured a little later to make the assertion that she could have taken these two steps within three months. But she didn't. She did not understand the meaning of the monoclinic space group of the C2 type, and did not see that the bases connect in pairs and in this way create the genetic code. "It is easy to feel sympathy for Franklin," wrote science historian Horace Freeland Judson. "The fact remains that she never made the inductive jump."
But Rosalind has always been taught, in her childhood, in her days as Polina, as a student and as a scientist, never to sail beyond the facts, and never to go far to what lies beyond the hard evidence. A bold leap of imagination was as alien to her nature as overdrawing her checking account, or wearing a red dress with cleavage.
The fact is that during two dismal years, in which she worked alone, except for Gosling's friend, in a field of research that was new to her, she came within two steps of the answer to the most exciting question in post-war science. Furthermore, unbeknownst to her, she provided all the essential data required for those who did make two brilliant leaps of intuition - to the antiparallel chains, and to the base pairs - and cracked the puzzle.
The advice Donoyu pulled out of his sleeve regarding the "keto" form of the bases tipped the scales in Cavendish's favor. Watson, who was busy at the end of the month adjusting his cardboard cutouts, suddenly noticed that when adenine hydrogen bonds to thymine, a certain shape is obtained that is identical to the shape obtained when cytosine binds to guanine. The paired pairs overlap each other; The explanation for Chargaf's relationship is found. Moreover, the same couples are always together. Adenine always binds to thymine; and cytosine - to guanine. Whenever one of them appears in any position along the long chain of DNA, its partner is always in front of it on the opposite chain. One side of the molecule (chain, or one strand) is therefore the complementary image of the opposite side. When the chains are separated, each of them may serve as a template on which a new, complementary chain will be formed (identical to the previously separated chain). The base pairs contain the secret of DNA - how traits are passed from generation to generation, from cell to cell, from parent to offspring. The DNA molecule is a series of chemical instructions, which work against the substance's tendency to lose its orderly structure, and allow new molecules to be identical to their predecessors. The date was February 28, 1953. It was at noon when (according to Watson's mythological book) "Francis broke into the 'Eagle' to tell everyone within earshot that we had found the secret of life."
Dunoy was one of many who later felt that their part in the great discovery had been underestimated. "It cannot be denied," he wrote in 1976, "that if I had not been fated to sit in a joint office with Watson and Crick at Cavendish in 1952-1953, they would still be struggling in their attempts to pair the enol forms of the bases in a 'dome-with-dome' approach" .
The Cavendish team did not change their condescending attitude towards Rosalind. This is how Peter Poling wrote to his father in March about the rivalry between Cavendish and Kings: "Wilkins should be the one who does this work; Miss Franklin is plain stupid. Relations are now somewhat strained because of Watson Creek's entry into the area. They have some ideas and I will write you about them right away. Actually it is their job to tell you about it, not mine (…) They become very involved in their efforts and lose their objectivity.
Maurice Wilkins has never been able to make better use of his sense of metaphor. With a heart lamenting for the approaching separation from his prophetess of wrath, he wrote on Saturday, March 7, to Kerik:
I think you will be interested to know that our dark lady is about to leave us next week (…) I am now reasonably freed from other engagements and have begun to organize a general attack on the secret citadels of nature (…) At last the decks are clear of every obstacle, and we can muster all hands to operate the The pumps! It won't last much longer. Greetings to everyone!
yours forever,
M.
He was late. The secret citadels of nature surrendered to the peasants wielding the pitchforks from Cambridge. The latest model of the DNA double helix (or at least, one twist of it; on the scale they used, an entire DNA molecule would reach a height of almost 80,000 km) was completed on Saturday, March 7. Crick watched him as he read Wilkins' letter.
Rosalind also knew how to write a sharp letter. On March 10, without a clue of what happened in Cavendish, she poured her heart out to Adrienne Weil in Paris, saying that the most important thing for her was to get out of Kings as quickly as possible.
"I start working at Birkbeck next week. The transition was delayed a few times - first because I missed a month when I was sick with the flu and all that stuff in the fall, then because I thought an extra month would give me a lot of extra results - but it didn't, and now I'm abandoning unfinished work to get out of King's without any further delay. I don't know yet what I will do in Birkbeck. In principle, I can do whatever I want, and that means I will spend a lot of time in all kinds of games and matters before I sit down to work on something. As far as the laboratory is concerned, I'm moving from a palace to a ruin, but I'm sure that even so I'll be more comfortable in Birkbeck."
On March 12, Wilkins went to Cambridge to see with his own eyes what was reported to him on the phone from Kendrew; Watson and Crick were probably too embarrassed to tell him themselves that they had cracked the DNA. The model suited him there, its elegance declares its accuracy. Wilkins chivalrously rejected (unfortunately for Rosalind, it was King's excessive modesty again) any idea of being included as a partner in the discovery: “I felt that the model itself was their work. Crick was quick to agree." It was agreed that the findings would be published separately. Wilkins returned to London, and according to him, "I told everyone about it."
For Rosalind, the knowledge that Cavendish had cracked the DNA was an irrelevant parting gift. She had faith in her two articles that were on their way to publication, which would provide solid data on the structure of DNA, and not just a hypothesis. In any case, she and Gosling had the shorter B-form article almost finished, and she would be free to handle its publication next week.
Rosalind came to say hello to photographer Frida Ticehurst and to thank her for everything she did for her. She said (so Frieda remembered), "I'm not welcome here - we (herself and Wilkins) can never work together. I can't stay." After giving her farewell speech, she packed her things and turned her back on King's College, London. One thought that no doubt did not cross her mind is that half a century later, the institution she loathed would name one of its buildings after her, along with the name of the adversary who forever tagged her as the "Dark Lady".
From: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox. From English: Adi Marcuse-Hess. Philosophy and Science Series. Attic Book Publishers and Yediot Books
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Watson is being assassinated