Archive: Rosalind Franklin

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His seventh choice is the pioneering scientist Rosalind Franklin (1920 - 1958), first released in February 2018. During her distinguished career, Franklin carried out ground-breaking research into coal and viruses but she is perhaps best remembered for her investigations in the field of DNA. In 1952 her research generated a famous image that became known as Photograph 51. When the Cambridge scientists Francis Crick and James Watson saw this image, it enabled them the following year to work out that DNA has a double-helix structure, one of the most important discoveries of modern science. Watson, Crick and Franklin's colleague Maurice Wilkins received a Nobel Prize in 1962 for this achievement but Franklin did not and today many people believe that Franklin has not received enough recognition for her work. With: Patricia Fara President of the British Society for the History of Science Jim Naismith Interim lead of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, Director of the Research Complex at Harwell and Professor at the University of Oxford Judith Howard Professor of Chemistry at Durham University Producer: Victoria Brignell. Reading list: Jenifer Glynn, My Sister Rosalind Franklin (Oxford University Press, 2012) Kersten T. Hall, The Man in the Monkeynut Coat: William Astbury and the Forgotten Road to the Double-Helix (Oxford University Press, 2014) Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (HarperCollins, 2002) Anne Sayre, Rosalind Franklin and DNA (first published 1975; W. W. Norton, 2000) James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (first published 1968; W&N, 2010) In Our Time is a BBC Studios production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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  This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. Today's summer selection from the In Our Time archive considers the life and work of Rosalind Franklin. A chemist and X-ray crystalographer, for many years she was overshadowed by male scientists. It's widely thought that her key role in revealing the structure and functionality of DNA was underplayed for decades. The challenges which women faced

• 2:30Speaker 02

  in higher education when she started her degree in natural sciences at Cambridge in the late 30s were significant. She was the outstanding student of her year, gaining a first and publishing path-breaking papers. But by dint of her sex, Franklin was not awarded a degree but a mere diploma. While working on X-ray crystalography at King's College, she found her work blighted by overbearing male supervisors who would seek to take credit for her work. But together with one man, her student Raymond Gosling, who recognised her genius, she was responsible for Photo 51, an image which Crick and Watson saw

• 3:13Speaker 02

  as the proof they needed to confirm their thinking about DNA. When the Nobel Committee announced Crick and Watson as winners of the Prize for Medicine in 1962, there was no mention of Franklin. I hope this episode of In Our Time goes a little way to giving Franklin the recognition she deserves. Enjoy listening.

• 3:36Speaker 04

  Hello. In 1952, Rosalind Franklin was at King's College London, investigating the structure of DNA, creating images for analysis. One of the images made for that work, Photograph 51, has become famous. It provided information needed to deduce the structure of DNA, one of the great achievements of 20th century science, which Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins later received the Nobel Prize. But not Franklin, who moved on from DNA structure to do pioneering research into coal and viruses. And since her death, when she was only 37, many have argued that she deserved greater recognition, both of her role in the understanding of DNA and as a scientist more generally. With me to discuss Rosalind Franklin's life and work are Patricia Power, President of the British

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Society for the History of Science, Jim Naismith, interim lead of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, director of the research complex at Howard and professor at the University of Oxford, and Judith Howard, Professor of Chemistry at Durham University. Patricia Power, what was Rosalind Franklin's upbringing?

• 4:36Speaker 05

  Her upbringing, I think, was very important for the rest of her life for two main reasons. Firstly, she was very, very close to her family. And we know a lot about her childhood, about her relationships with her family, because whenever she was away from home, she wrote them very long, very eloquent, very intimate letters, which are absolutely marvellous to read nowadays. So she had three brothers, one sister. She was brought up in a very affluent, not wealthy but very affluent, family in London, in Notting Hill Gate. There were lots of other family members dotted around quite nearby. So it was a very, very large, close-knit family. She loved them a lot. The only thing she ever resented, or the main thing she ever

• 5:19Speaker 05

  resented against her parents, because everybody resents their parents from time to time, but the main thing was that when she was about nine or 10, for the benefit of her health, she was sent away for a couple of years to a boarding school near the coast. And she deeply regretted that. But when, as soon as she came back, she got sent to St. Paul's Day School in London, where she absolutely flourished. She worked very hard. She was very, very good at sport. She was never good at music. She developed some very, very close friendships. The other important thing, I think, about her upbringing and about this extended family is that she was born into a very well-established group of Anglo-Jewish people. And she wasn't religious herself, but the fact that she was born into this

• 6:04Speaker 05

  Jewish network was very important. So, for example, between the wars and during the war, her family took in some Jewish refugees, and they were engaged a lot in Jewish philanthropic works. She was always very, very sensitive about any suggestion of antisemitism, but when she went to Cambridge, she was welcomed into a Jewish society there. So I think these two aspects of her upbringing, the very, very warm, loving extended family, and the fact that it was a Jewish family, were both very significant.

• 6:35Speaker 04

  She went up to Cambridge in 1938 to read natural sciences. How unusual was that for a woman at that time?

• 6:42Speaker 05

  It was extremely unusual to read the sciences. In any case, there was a rule, a regulation at Cambridge, that limited the total number of women to 500, to be 10% of the total faculty.

• 6:54Speaker 04

  The whole university?

• 6:55Speaker 05

  In the whole university. There were only two women's colleges then, Newham and Girton. All the other colleges were men only. It's difficult to tell the statistics because it was wartime. Well, in the following year, it was wartime, which meant that a lot of the male lecturers and a lot of the male students were absent. So actually, while she was there, there was a slightly higher proportion of women than there were normally. But to study the sciences was a very, very unusual thing to do. Remembering my own experiences as a physics undergraduate at Oxford, where I was, again, still vastly outnumbered by men, what mattered isn't the number of men, it's the attitudes towards the women. So

• 7:37Speaker 05

  at that stage, when Rosalind Franklin was at Cambridge, women couldn't graduate. They didn't technically belong to the university. They were there as a presence, but they weren't ordinary students. And I think, I think it's that sort of feeling that she was different apart and oddity. I think it's that aspect of her life at Cambridge, which was very difficult for her to cope with.

• 7:58Speaker 04

  She didn't get, they weren't allowed to get degrees, they got diplomas, for instance?

• 8:01Speaker 05

  That's right, yes. They weren't, they, she took all the examinations, and in one year she got a first. So she was, academically, she was right up at the top. But she never got the formal certificate. She never went through the very elaborate, very ceremonial graduation ceremony that's still practised at Cambridge today. But no women were allowed to participate in that before 1948.

• 8:26Speaker 04

  Excuse me. Given that it was unusual for a woman to study natural sciences at Cambridge, how did she come to want to study that?

• 8:32Speaker 05

  Because that was what she'd loved ever since she was a small child. She was absolutely passionate about science. She was very, very good at mathematics. That was what she wanted to do. And she was quite single-minded. She knew from a young age that that was going to be her life. It was, she wrote somewhere that it was her passion. It was almost like a religious faith, this desire to find out about the world.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  Jim, Jim Naismith, after graduating, she carried on research into coal and the war is on at that stage, the war is about to start when she's graduated. And her father, as I understand, is urging her to do war work, but she resisted him and stayed on the university and did a sort of, can you develop what she did there?

• 9:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, so it seems odd to us now because we think of coal as relatively dull, but of course, coal was really central to the country's existence. It's how we made all the electricity, the trains were run on coal. So there was a huge importance in understanding coal and its properties. And so what she did was, it was known that coal was porous and had unusual densities and it varied depending where you dug the coal. And coals had different properties and we didn't really understand why they had different properties. We didn't understand what the importance of those was. So what she did was that she used gases to probe the density of coal. And she began to work out that there were voids in the coal that were accessible to gases such as helium, others to larger molecules.

• 9:56Speaker 06

  And if you heated it, the properties of coal would change. And that was very important because some types of coal are called graphitizing and others are non-gravitizing. What that means is when you heat them, some of them turn into graphite, which is stuff in your pencil, and others turn into like a glass. And that type of glassy coal is very valuable, it's very unusual. And there was no, she did all the work that sort of predicted and unpacked that as to what type of coal you had.

• 10:23Speaker 04

  What effect did that have then? This sounds very practical. They rushed away into the coal mines and said, dig this and dig that. I mean, I'm being ridiculous, but was something like that happened?

• 10:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, so what it meant was that when you dug up a type of coal, you would know how it would behave under certain circumstances. And that was really important because it mattered what type of coal you would use. And so you could develop tests that she did that would allow you to work that out without just having to try and see.

• 10:49Speaker 04

  In that earlier, in that research as a young woman, is she doing things that, is she going into territory that hadn't been explored before?

• 10:56Speaker 06

  Yes, she, it had been known about this puzzle about the porosity of coal, but she really mapped it out and published single author papers as a PhD student and just after her PhD in what was called the British Coal Investigations, that BQRA. And these were her work, they were seen as her work and she was recognized for it at the time.

• 11:17Speaker 04

  She researched for much of her career, she researched using X-ray diffraction. Could you explain what that means and how she used it?

• 11:26Speaker 06

  So X-ray diffraction is a-

• 11:28Speaker 04

  Is this when she's in Paris or when she's in England as well?

• 11:30Speaker 06

  She began that work in Paris-

• 11:32Speaker 04

  She went to Paris for four years?

• 11:33Speaker 06

  With Miering. And he had been a pioneer of application of X-rays to study more of these complex sort of amorphous solids. So crystallography was sort of born in Germany and the UK by the Braggs, of course, and famous in the UK. And that had been applied to crystals. So if you think of a Kit Kat, if I break a Kit Kat, you imagine all the layers in a Kit Kat. Now, if you turn those layers in a certain way when X-rays hit them, and I'm simplifying of course, but you'll get a diffracted beam at a certain angle. And so the X-rays will bounce off and the efficiency of that bouncing tells you what was in the layer. So it allows you to understand the properties, see all the atoms inside

• 12:16Speaker 06

  a molecule. So it's incredibly useful. And what she learned in Miering's lab was its application to not just single crystals, but these more amorphous, complex organ shapes and sizes that were in coal. And her work in Miering's lab established why coals would graphitize and why they wouldn't. So she had known that you could, that was, she had worked out that property, but with her X-ray work, she was able to give a molecular understanding as to the type of coal.

• 12:44Speaker 04

  So those four years in Paris were very advanced learning for her. And Paris was a good place to go for X-ray work, of course.

• 12:52Speaker 06

  For this type of X-ray work, it was leading and she did some leading research there. You know, she worked out, so if you'd asked people by that stage, who was one of the experts in understanding the structure of coal, her name would have been that person.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  Judith Howard, can you tell us more about crystallography and X-ray in terms of her increasing absorption in the subject?

• 13:14Speaker 05

  Well, as we've heard, that she was taught really, apart from her undergraduate learning that she would have done in Cambridge, she was taught by Miering and Matur in Paris. And they were experts in this field of disorder. And so she-

• 13:29Speaker 04

  Disorder?

• 13:30Speaker 05

  The non-ordered material, such as coal. Not, it wasn't a single crystal, it wasn't crystalline as we would know it. And so she was working with these experts to understand those properties of coal, well, different forms of carbon. And one of the things that was important, of course, was discovering these non-gravitic type of carbons, which we used what we call molecular sieves today. And they were industrially important and coal was generally important. Her understanding of crystallography came really, I mean, she became an expert in handling the materials. She was primarily a physical chemist, she had very good technique, she was single-minded, she was very careful, she was an accurate

• 14:13Speaker 05

  experimentalist. And so I think she really sort of thrived in an environment which this lab was in Paris. She loved Paris and she worked very hard. She learnt more about crystallography when she moved back to London and when she moved to the laboratory at King's.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  But crystallography, can you explain to listeners who like the word and are getting a feel for it, more precisely what she was looking for and what it was about?

• 14:41Speaker 05

  Well, what she was trying to determine was the, the order of the atoms inside the structure of, inside the material. We can't see into a lump of coal, we can't see ourselves into a lump of sugar or a piece of salt, a grain of salt rather. But the technique of X-ray diffraction allows you to determine the molecular composition, and in other words, where the atoms are inside those materials. That's important because the structure relates to the function. And of course, we're moving into where we look at the structures of biological materials, where they relate to the function. But as we were hearing from Jim earlier,

• 15:23Speaker 05

  the types of coal and their properties, their function was vitally important at the time of the war.

• 15:30Speaker 04

  Tell me anything from her notebooks or from the letters Patricia mentioned at the beginning of the program about her love for crystallography and how it grew.

• 15:37Speaker 05

  I think she found it, yes, she did enjoy it very much passionately, but she found it an exact science. She found it was somewhere where she could get an answer that was important, that was important, not just for the sake of getting a scientific response, a result, sorry, but also to, to where it was industrially important. And that was the stage at which she was at in Paris. But of course, moving into biology, she would understand why a knowledge of the molecular structure was important for other reasons.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  So that would come in later in the story. How does the crystallography undertaken today compare with the work that Rosalind Franklin was doing then in Paris and just after?

• 16:20Speaker 05

  Well, the very early equipment that they would have had then, a lot of it was, so to speak, homemade. They were using fairly primitive X-ray tubes. She had to very often clean her diffusion pumps that created the vacuum in the tubes. And for this, she would be using literally buckets of benzene to clean out the pumps. The cameras were very often homemade. When I say a camera, one had to support the sample, whether it was a piece of coal, a crystal, a fiber. The sample has to be supported in some way so that you can direct the beam at it in an ordered way. And so the, and those were to some extent made by her and she understood them, she knew how to deal with them. But

• 17:05Speaker 05

  of course, the time taken to take one of these photographic plates to record the data, and it was the only way they could do it, was much, much longer. Some of her exposures for the DNA fibers later were about 100 hours, which seems amazing today. And of course, we didn't have the computers. A lot of, principally the work was done by hand. We had, if you like, mathematical formally to work from, but we didn't have the computers. Today, of course, the sort of work that she was doing, the data are collected now digitally, we have very fast computers, we have instruments that are made by companies very often, we don't have to make our own. And so it's the speed of which things have changed, but

• 17:49Speaker 05

  not surprisingly, over 50, 60 years, the technology's moved on, which makes us able to look at materials in a different way and to be able to look at structure evolution over, over time, over temperature and so on. It's, it's not a different science fundamentally, but the way it's used is different today.

• 18:08Speaker 04

  Patricia Farah, can we just dwell on Paris a little bit? Because it was so important to her emotionally, she enjoyed it very much. She went for two years, stayed for four and came back, we can talk about that in half a minute or so. But what else did she enjoy in Paris? The life in Paris because she was not in England?

• 18:25Speaker 07

  Well, she first went to France when she was a child, and then she went again for a few months in between leaving school and going to university. A lot of people write about Rosalind Franklin, that her life was rather compartmentalized. She had, when she was in England, she had one set of characteristics which she showed to people at work, and she had another set where she was very friendly and outgoing and she had lots of close colleagues and family. I think in Paris, those two came together and there wasn't this discrimination and the exclusion from the workplace, which she certainly experienced at King's. King's notoriously, she wasn't allowed into the common room. But in Paris, she was, men and

• 19:09Speaker 07

  women were on equal terms, so she had a good social life. And she also, she was very athletic. She loved going for walks in mountains and going on extended trips. And so that was also something she could do in France as well. So she liked the social life, she liked the active life, and she loved being integrated within the laboratory.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  Was it quite an advanced community of scientists working with X-rays at the time? Was she within-

• 19:35Speaker 07

  Oh, she was, she was at the cutting edge of that particular area of science. She was doing very, very advanced work. It was, it was seen as being very, very important. And she really enjoyed, enjoyed it. It was a great tussle, whether to stay in France or whether to come back to England. One of the main reasons she came back to England was that was where her very, very close friends lived and she needed to be with them.

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• 22:39Speaker 04

  See them. Jim, Jim Smith, in 1951, she did come back to England, to London, went to, got a job at King's College while research was, research was being undertaken into DNA. And it was not the only place DNA was being researched in various other places, notably Cambridge. Why was the interest in DNA becoming more intense at that time?

• 23:04Speaker 06

  Because by that stage, we had worked out that that was the information transfer. So the key-

• 23:10Speaker 04

  What do you mean by that?

• 23:12Speaker 06

  If we think about parent and child, you know, the characteristics of a parent that appear in a child are information transfer when you get a plant from a seed. We know that there's information, and so there'd been a big puzzle for many years about how that information, what was the basis of heredity. And by this stage, by 1950s, it was understood that this was DNA. So there was a tremendous excitement to work out-

• 23:38Speaker 04

  It was understood that this was DNA, but they didn't know what DNA was.

• 23:42Speaker 06

  Correct.

• 23:43Speaker 04

  So why did they call, why did they, it was understood it was DNA? I don't get it. Understood it was DNA, but they don't know what it is. Why did they understand it was if they didn't know what it was?

• 23:50Speaker 06

  They knew about the chemistry of it. They could tell you what it was composed of, nucleic acids, and they were linked in polymers, but they had no idea how that then led to information transfer. So they had known that if you take DNA from one organism, put it in another organism, that, in quote, they were doing sort of primitive transfer experiments. And they had worked out that DNA contained instruction book for life, but they had no idea how it worked. And as Judith had said, the ability to see molecules in three dimensions tells you how they work. That's a chemist's belief.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  Were those who were working on it aware of how dramatic and how very important this was going to be if discovered?

• 24:32Speaker 06

  I think so. I think the-

• 24:35Speaker 04

  Or when discovered, yeah.

• 24:36Speaker 06

  I think everybody under, I mean, it was the great challenge of its age to understand how you would transfer information from parent to child. How does DNA copy itself? It was such an important question that people understood it would be earth-shattering.

• 24:48Speaker 04

  Judith, can I come back to women and crystallography? There are quite a few women went into crystallography. Was it that it had a particular, particular allure for them, or was it an accident, or where are we?

• 25:00Speaker 07

  I think it certainly wasn't an accident. I mean, in the early days of the subject, and this was a new subject, even at the time Rosalind was working, it wasn't that old. I mean, after all, Bragg had done the seminal work in 1912. But there were, could I say, enlightened men in the field in the early days who didn't try and keep the women scientists who wanted to join them. They didn't want to keep them out. They encouraged them to come in. There were several in the early days, very notable women. Rosalind would have been one of them. She was already, but she didn't live long enough to be, become a household name, let's say, well, she is, but differently. Dorothy Hodgkin, Kathleen Lonsdale. And there were not only the Braggs, but Ben Earl, Max Proust, the great names that we

• 25:44Speaker 07

  know in the subject were encouraging to the women to join them.

• 25:48Speaker 04

  Patricia Shapiro, she wasn't, let's get, she's got to King's, and there's Maurice Wilkins, and there seems to be a misunderstanding from the start between the two of them. What was that and how did it, if it did, resolve itself?

• 26:00Speaker 07

  Well, she was originally employed to investigate proteins, because at that stage there was still some confusion and whether it was the protein or the DNA that was responsible for heredity. And then they've decided to focus on DNA, and she was told by letter that she was going to be switched from proteins. She was told by letter that she was going to be working with a PhD student called Ray Gosling. Maurice Wilkins was told that she was arriving, but he had the impression that she was working for him in his team at a lower level. And it was unfortunate, a coincidence, that when she first got there, the first day, he was away on holiday.

• 26:42Speaker 07

  So the whole thing was shrouded in confusion right from the very beginning. And then on top of that, there seems to have been a huge personal animosity between them. They just did not get on with each other. And I imagine, as is typical in those situations, they were probably equally to blame. So right from the very beginning, Rosalind Franklin assumed she was working on her own in charge of Ray Gosling. She was his PhD supervisor. Wilkins chose to assume that she was working with him and for him. And that was the source of all the problems that ensued over the next few years.

• 27:17Speaker 04

  And the daily working arrangements, as you alluded to briefly earlier at that college, where we think of them as anti-diluvian, but it's in a lifetime, that women were not allowed into the, can you tell us?

• 27:30Speaker 07

  I mean, I think part of the problem, I think it still applies to women today, is what's technically enshrined in law, isn't actually what happened. So the attitudes prevailed against her. She wasn't allowed into the shared common room for lunch. But then there's other things. The men would go out to the bar afterwards. So there was quite a sort of drink and blokey sort of culture in the, in the group. And she wasn't allowed to go with them to the bar. So in all sorts of small ways, she was made to feel like an outsider. She wasn't invited to parties, she just wasn't part of the social group. And that quite rapidly can make somebody feel very isolated. The one person who remained extremely loyal to her throughout was her PhD student, Ray

• 28:15Speaker 07

  Gosling. And it was Ray Gosling who took the famous photograph, and he really admired her and liked her a lot.

• 28:23Speaker 04

  And we now come to this photograph, Jim Smith, photograph 51. Can you tell us about that?

• 28:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, so Wilkins had already begun to take photographs of DNA. And the DNA samples had come from Switzerland, and they were better than anything people had seen before. But what Franklin's unique contribution was, was that the first photographs were difficult to interpret. They were cloud, you know, it was a complex pattern that wasn't easily understood. And Franklin worked out that she could convert what became known as A-form DNA, which is kind of like a dehydrated form, to B-form DNA, which is hydrated. And she could interconvert between those two. Now, the photograph 51 is the B-form of DNA, which is a hydrated. To give an example, if I, the difference between A and B, if I imagine a bath towel

• 29:09Speaker 06

  soaked in water, and I turn it into, you know, swirl it around my hand, it's a nice sausage shape. If I squeeze it, the water comes out and the towel shortens. So A-form is a twisted, squeezed out with less water in it and slightly shorter shape. B-form is a swollen, full-of-water form. But B-form was, it was clear that it was helical. It was very obvious it was helical. And as soon as Watson saw it and the measurements it contained, he made that leap. So that photograph 51 was a seminal moment.

• 29:41Speaker 04

  What did, do we have any record of what Rosalind Franklin saw when she saw it?

• 29:47Speaker 06

  She realized it was a really important image, and she reported it in an MRC report. But they had this agreement in King's that she would work in A-form and Wilkins would work in B-form. And it was one of those curious things that if you look at the King's lab and compare it to the Cambridge lab, as we were just talking a bit about earlier, there wasn't the same sense of all in it together, bouncing ideas off one another. And if you look at the discovery of DNA, it wasn't just Watson, Crick. There was a lot of people, they were bouncing ideas off in that lab. And little snippets came that allowed them to get to their model. The King's lab, as I read it, didn't have that sense of sharing and discussion, and they suffered for it.

• 30:29Speaker 04

  Judith, let's go back to Watson. Jim Watson saw this photograph 51. Can you tell us how he reacted and how that fitted into the research that he and Crick were doing back at Cambridge?

• 30:41Speaker 07

  Yes, I think in an unguarded moment, one could say that Wilkins had shown Watson, who was visiting King's, this famous 51 photograph.

• 30:49Speaker 04

  What he ought not to have done, you think?

• 30:51Speaker 07

  Well, there was competition between King's and Cambridge.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  Why would he do it then?

• 30:56Speaker 07

  Well, Wilkins was friendly with Watson and Crick, and he would be proud of the best photograph that had been taken to date of DNA had come from his lab.

• 31:07Speaker 05

  They had already been speaking, that is Watson and Crick, with Wilkins on the matter whenever Wilkins visited Cambridge. I don't think there were too many sequences, you say, ideas bounce off each other, but they didn't include Rosalind in this discussion. And I say unguarded because perhaps he shouldn't have done, yes, but then, as I say, they were sharing information. And Watson immediately recognised the significance of this, the Black Cross, as we know it on the photograph, and how important that was to let him know it was a helical structure. They'd built, Watson and Crick had built a model of DNA a year previous, but it was wrong. They had the phosphate groups in the wrong place and the bases in the wrong place.

• 31:48Speaker 05

  And this meant that they had to rethink their structure, but with the information that came from this one photograph, and together with all the other information, as Jim says, that was being bounced around, different ideas, different people really contributed to the whole story. Rosalind was determined not to start building models until she was certain of her data. And the pair, Watson and Crick, had a different attitude. It was sort of, hey, let's go build a model, let's see if we can do this, you know, we've got enough information. And the information, experimental data, as they called it, information, had all come from other people, because they were very bright people, but they had not collected the X-ray data themselves. That information had come from King's.

• 32:32Speaker 05

  And earlier from Asbury's lab, I should say.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  So they made the model, and the basis, well, it often happens in science in all sorts of disciplines, isn't it, from other people's information that they found a new way of putting together?

• 32:45Speaker 05

  Yes, and it was a very successful move. It was a leap of imagination, one could say, but it was certainly very successful. And it gave them the clue, as we were hearing earlier from Jim, about the transfer of information and why DNA was just so important to hereditary.

• 33:04Speaker 04

  Did they, sorry, excuse me. Did they tell Rosalind Franklin about this when they found, did they include her in the conversation, or was she, was she part of this, you've talked about the three men knowing each other, but she also was a friend of Crick's, as I understand it, and so on, so was she not included? Jim, you want to say something?

• 33:21Speaker 06

  Only after they had done the rounds of the model, they were, they agreed for publication. It was shared before they actually reported it, but she wasn't, they didn't invite her to bounce ideas off, no. They had worked out the structure and then she was told. And they never really told her they had used her photograph. And that was never made clear to her or to others, what a central role that photograph had played.

• 33:44Speaker 04

  Was it a central role?

• 33:45Speaker 05

  I think so. Personally, I think it was. I mean, if she'd been working on her own, she too would have, I think, achieved the same result, but later. They could have collected some data in Cambridge from other people, and they would have taken longer to reach the point at which they were able to build this correct model. So to some extent, it was a question of timing. There was a bit of a race. And the race, of course, included as well Linus Pauling across in California.

• 34:15Speaker 07

  But I think it also represents two different ways of approaching science, and we tend to celebrate Watson and Crick because precisely they made this imaginative leap, it was very intuitive, it was very creative, it's often a eureka moment, a flash of inspiration. But there is another way of doing science, which is to be very methodological, to be very systematic, not to hazard any guess until you can back it up with solid information. And that was the route that Rosalind Franklin followed. And it is what scientists are taught to do, to be systematic, to rely on their observations. In a sense, Crick and Watson succeeded because they broke all the rules. And now we celebrate them for doing that.

• 34:56Speaker 06

  I wouldn't, I might slightly disagree with that, but I think the point is true, there are certainly two approaches, but Franklin was, and this is sometimes was the myth created that she was unimaginative, that's far from the truth, that it's shown in her work in coal and then later with viruses. She's very smart, she was able to make leaps of imagination. My own view is that it was the problem of this, she was tied to A form, this was a B form result, she didn't give it the attention that she should have done, and that team in King's wouldn't work as a team. Had they all looked at that, it might have been different.

• 35:31Speaker 07

  And also, the, as I understand it, the A form, it was less obvious that it was a helical structure. And one of the things she worried about was that when A changed into B, that it became helical, and so when you, when you looked at the A form, it actually wasn't helical. And Crick and Watson chose to ignore that distinction. And that was an important part of, one important reason for her reservation, for her hesitation, for her insistence on getting everything firmly documented and sorting out, sorted out.

• 36:02Speaker 05

  She was nonetheless the first person to recognise that you could interconvert the A form to the B form, and it was a question of the humidity. She had, she was an expert, being a good physical chemist, from her early work and her undergraduate studies in the time in France, she knew how to hydrate fibres or to dehydrate them, and that was absolutely crucial in knowing they interconverted. So if there's a helix in one form, it made sense that there should be a helix in the other. But she did not want to make that supposition or extracted it from the, just as an intuitive guess, rather than having the data.

• 36:37Speaker 04

  You said earlier that she, she wasn't told they'd used her photograph. Was she ever told? Did she die without knowing? I mean, that's being rather dramatic, but was it true? Did she die without knowing?

• 36:48Speaker 06

  I think, from what I read now, it appears that she didn't really know just how critical that particular photograph was to the leap. Although it was published in the Nature paper, I don't think that, you know, the history that emerged of what a crucial role that played, and it wasn't just as simple as they looked at the helix, they also, the space group, which is a crystallography term, was really important because that allowed Crick to work out the strands had to run in opposite directions. And she, because she hadn't really analysed it, hadn't come to that conclusion.

• 37:18Speaker 07

  And she remained very friendly, particularly with Crick, right until the time she died, and that would have been unlikely to have happened if she'd realised how her photo had been used.

• 37:28Speaker 05

  There was a report that she had written because of her fellowship that she'd received, and this report fell into the hands of the people in Cambridge. In that report, she did give the dimensions that she'd extracted from her photographs, her careful results, which showed that the separation of the base pairs was a certain value, the turn on the helix was a certain magnitude, and the diameter of the structure was a certain magnitude as well. Now, all these data and the space group were in that report, and again, that had been picked up in Cambridge. So this is all information feeding in to the model that was built finally in Cambridge.

• 38:07Speaker 06

  And I, you know, I don't think, I think everybody recognises that that wasn't handled properly and she wasn't given the credit. But there is, to set aside that, is also the thing that science isn't supposed to work in secret, that you, these are publicly funded research, that you can't just hide data because you don't want others to see it. And so, you know, there is that countervailing view, is that if she, the information was known, it shouldn't be kept secret. But I think that what was the problem was she was never given the credit at the time as to how important that image was.

• 38:37Speaker 07

  But again, against that, Watson, according to his own account, quite deliberately and self-consciously embarked on a race, joined with Crick, against the group, King's, and against Pauling, against everybody else. He wanted to be there first. That was really, really important to him, and he wrote about that quite openly later.

• 38:57Speaker 05

  The only thing I would add is that there's a difference really between working in secret and having things which are confidential perhaps until they're published. And I think we, we all know the difference of that as working scientists, but we don't really work in secret ultimately because we need to publish, we want to publish, we want to give the world the answers.

• 39:16Speaker 04

  Patricia, why did Watson and Crick and Wilkins receive the Nobel Prize for discovering DNA and not Franklin?

• 39:24Speaker 07

  Well, the internal workings of the Nobel Prize committee are quite difficult to decipher sometimes, but there are two technical reasons why she couldn't have received it. The first is that by the time they announced the prize, she had already died, and you can only be awarded the Nobel Prize while you're alive. The other problem is that it can only be awarded to a maximum of three people. So if she had been alive, I would like to think that it would have been awarded to Watson, Crick and Franklin.

• 39:55Speaker 04

  Is it possible to weigh the value of her contribution in the discovery, the great, one of the greatest scientists to discover all time? Is that possible?

• 40:06Speaker 05

  I think the contribution Rosalind made was enormous. It's very hard to put a number on it because there were snippets of information coming from different directions, people working in different ways on the same material, people doing spectroscopy, people doing different, you know, biochemistry, using biochemistry tools. To put a number on it would be extremely difficult. I don't know if my colleagues want to put a number on it, I don't think I do, but it was significant, Melvin, because of the way, it was a jigsaw, it was a piece of the jigsaw which at the time was crucially important. The question we could all ask is, had she lived, would she have shared the Nobel Prize?

• 40:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. She went on to do, now to move aside from DNA for a second, she did some very fine work, according to her brethren, very fine work indeed in science, on her, off her own bat, as it were. And when she, after leaving King's, she went to Birkbeck in London, where she worked on viruses, for instance. Can you tell us a little about that?

• 41:09Speaker 05

  Well, she moved from King's to Birkbeck to work in the lab of Bernal, and there the atmosphere was really quite different, and she started work on viruses, she was working on the tobacco mosaic virus. Now, Crick had worked on this in Cambridge, or Cambridge had been working on this scientist there, and they did share information. And information was shared between those working on this, on these viruses, rather.

• 41:36Speaker 05

  One required to get the samples, which were single crystals. They weren't easy to get and a lot of her experience that she'd had leading up to this point enabled her to get the material in the right form and get some very good photographs. And she had all this experience behind her on working with the nucleic acid structures. And I think that wasn't the only time that she did extremely seminal independent research. She'd been publishing single author papers when she was at Cambridge. Part of her degree. Five papers came out in that time. She did independent work and was publishing again, single author papers from her time in Paris. It's strange that out of a shortened, a foreshortened career,

• 42:21Speaker 05

  where she was an excellent scientist, the story tends to concentrate on a period of less than two years. It's a vital point in time of the discovery of the structure of DNA. Um, but it's it is just part of her career. The virus, the details in which she worked out for the virus structures, um, made a significant impact on people working in the field. Bragg asked her for, to be able to build a big structure for him for an exhibition, which she did. Uh, there are interesting stories about that. I don't know whether Jim wants to add more on virus structures, but.

• 42:54Speaker 06

  Again, again, the, the reason viruses attracted people was because they were sort of not living, but they were able to transfer information. And so they knew they had to have instruction sets inside them. And what Rosalind Franklin did was work out what the organisation of the protein shell was and where the nucleic acids were inside the virus. And that had come along, history, Burnell had taken some of the early pictures. But Franklin's work established a question that was key to understanding them. Where was the nucleic acids? And her work was seminal and it was seen as really an important discovery that we understood how viruses were organised the first time.

• 43:30Speaker 04

  Now, in terms of seeing how other scientists developed their, their lives, to die when you're thirty seven, as she did, was obviously a terrific loss. She died of ovarian cancer. Had that anything to do uh, with working with X-rays in Paris or working with X-rays at a time when they, people were rather not as careful about it?

• 43:50Speaker 05

  I think it's difficult to say. I mean, certainly the um health and safety aspects that were prevalent in the labs in those days, um, sorry, in today were not there then. Um, and it would be possibly regarded as, as a lax way of working from that which we're allowed to do today. Uh, so it wasn't negligence, it might have been ignorance if there was any fault, if you like, in the way they worked. Uh, however, she had had various childhood illnesses. She suffered jaundice when she was twenty two. She'd had a few health problems, but nothing hugely serious. Uh, so it's hard to say whether the radiation was the trigger for ovarian cancer or contributor.

• 44:34Speaker 05

  What she did do, because she was so strongly passionate about her science and didn't want anything to get in the way, she ignored the early signs. She ignored pains that she was having in America. She wanted to do more of her tour. She stayed meeting people until she really needed to have investigations when she got back from the States on that trip, which was in um nineteen fifty six.

• 44:55Speaker 04

  And had she caught it sooner? It might be a happier story.

• 44:58Speaker 05

  Hard to say because our knowledge of how to treat cancer in the late fifties was not as it is today. So, and she was given some experimental, in quotes, uh, treatment and she was taken to the Marsden Hospital latterly. It's hard to say, but it certainly, one could say the X-radiation that she received, um, might have been a contributor. But I don't think we can say for certain.

• 45:23Speaker 07

  I think it's rather ironic that she suffered from ovarian cancer, which is obviously a woman's disease. And I've just been thinking about how she would feel about this programme today. And I get the impression that she wanted, would have liked to be remembered not as a woman, but as a scientist who did very, very important work in DNA, in coal, in the tobacco, uh, mosaic virus. She was not particularly keen on campaigning for women. That wasn't how she thought of herself. And I think she'd rather be remembered as a great scientist for her scientific career, somebody who was determined to continue, even though she was ill. I think she'd rather be remembered for that

• 46:03Speaker 07

  than for being a pioneering woman or a downtrodden woman or anything else in her identity as a woman. She want, she was very, very clever. She was a very intellectual, determined, focused person. And I think that's how she'd like to be remembered.

• 46:16Speaker 04

  Would you agree with that, Judith?

• 46:17Speaker 05

  Yes, I think so. Yes. I mean, she, she was not somebody who would go around, um, being a suffragette, if you like, in, in terms of the scientific, she was just, she was passionate about her science. She wanted to be remembered for that, which is why, of course, she did the work she did. Uh, she was well known for it. She published widely, considering her, you know, not very many years in, in, in, in science. And I think she deserves to be remembered for the work she did as a scientist. The legacy in part is DNA, but she did a lot more very vital, um, pieces of work than that in her subject. And I think she would be more than happy to remembered as that

• 47:00Speaker 05

  uh, than the, as I say, this period of her life, which was really quite short.

• 47:03Speaker 07

  And also at the time, uh, DNA wasn't seen as being such a momentous discovery as in retrospect it has turned out to be.

• 47:11Speaker 04

  Finally, a legacy from you, Jim.

• 47:13Speaker 06

  I think actually that what she would have been most proud of would would have been the obituary written by J D Burnell at the time. And that was contemplaneous. She had just died. It was written at the time and it dwelt on her immense contributions to science. On all, it went through systematically what she'd done in coal, her importance to the DNA story and also her work in viruses. And that was, and that's important for people to remember is that at the time she was written about in The Times, The New York Times and in Nature and obituary. Very few scientists get that. She was seen at the time as a really important person in science.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  Well, thank you very much for that. Thank you, Jim Naismith, Patricia Power, Judith Howard. Next week we'll be discussing the ancient Chinese warrior and philosopher Sun Tzu, known as the author of The Art of War. Thanks for listening.

• 48:02Speaker 07

  And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. One of the things I was going to say and didn't get an opportunity is just to think about, sort of pick up in a way what I was saying about different attitudes towards men and women that you, you can't actually pin down very easily. And one way of thinking about that is vocabulary. So if you've got a man and a woman who exhibits similar behaviour, in a woman, in a man, you would use a word such as authoritative. Whereas for a woman, you would say she was being authoritarian. It's a small difference, but these small shifts in vocabulary, when you're referring to men and you're referring to women, slight differences in behaviour and in attitudes.

• 48:46Speaker 07

  There's something that can affect women quite strongly. So another problem that she had that's very often attributed to women is a great lack of self-confidence. So she, every time she took exams at Cambridge, there was a great crisis and she was convinced that she'd failed, whereas in fact she came top. And I, I think.

• 49:04Speaker 04

  But that doesn't only apply to women, Patricia.

• 49:05Speaker 07

  It doesn't only apply to women, but this idea, this idea that women internalise a lack of self-confidence because for centuries and centuries and centuries, everybody has assumed that women are intellectually inferior to men. And I think amongst female students, you see that um in supervisions and in seminars, they're reluctant to speak out, they're reluctant to express their own ideas. And I think there is this general, uh, internalised lack of self-confidence.

• 49:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, um, Jim.

• 49:37Speaker 06

  One thing that's missed is what a kind person she was and she made lots of friends in science. And the thing in Kings was just so dreadfully unhappy for her. But I think that the notion that she was in any way distant or sort of dispelled, if you look at Aaron Klug. Uh, she left Aaron Klug money in her will that made a huge difference to his life. She had friends throughout science. And the issue with self-confidence, she'd overcome that by the time she was at Kings. She was confident in giving public lectures. She defended her work. She had grown way beyond the, the undergraduate, as Patricia was talking about, that nervousness. And I think, you know, that, that side of her life, that she wasn't some terribly sad victim. She had an unhappy time in Kings.

• 50:22Speaker 06

  But outside of that period, she made many friends. She was a well-valued colleague. And she mentored, um, Ken Holmes and Aaron Klug went on to very famous scientists, or their name I forget. But they, they had a huge admiration for her as a person.

• 50:36Speaker 07

  Ray Gosling would be another example, yes.

• 50:39Speaker 05

  Yes, the confidence thing, um.

• 50:43Speaker 05

  May have been there at different times in the anterographic period as well, but certainly when she realised that Linus Pauling's model was incorrect, she actually wrote to him. I mean, there's the great Linus Pauling, and Rosalind sent him a letter and basically said he was wrong. And I think that shows confidence. She did the same in open speeches, different conferences. If she found that somebody had given a wrong result, she would stand up and say so.

• 51:07Speaker 04

  We didn't actually bring Linus Pauling in quite enough, did we? Can you just say a bit more for those listening to this about why Linus Pauling was hovering in the background, threatening to hover in the foreground?

• 51:18Speaker 05

  He and his colleagues were working on the structure of the nuclear acids, and he had built a model, as I said, was incorrect. In the period just before the structure was announced from Cambridge, there was a paper from Linus Pauling and Corey written, which again suggested an incorrect structure. But this paper was being published in the National Academy of Sciences earlier the same spring. The copy of that paper came to Cambridge, it came to Bragg, and it also came to Pauling's son, Peter Pauling, who was at that time in Cambridge. So the information, which was vital, in fact, the work that Linus Pauling had done, because

• 52:00Speaker 05

  earlier, I forget the year, maybe one or two years earlier, he'd published information on the alpha helix. So the idea of helices, of coiled molecules, was being investigated, it was being talked about openly, and that at one time it seemed to be a race between the US and the UK. Then, of course, it turned into a bit of a race between Kings and Cambridge. But Linus was, of course, well known for his amazing amount of work in chemistry, the study of chemistry, the chemical bond and so on, from the early part of the century. And I can't remember the year of his Nobel Prize, Jim.

• 52:38Speaker 06

  He won it for the chemical bond, I can't remember when, but he also won the Peace Prize.

• 52:42Speaker 07

  He got two prizes. I think he was the first person to get two, no, apart from Marie Curie, sorry.

• 52:47Speaker 06

  What was significant about Pauling's paper was there was an elementary error in it. And everybody guessed, as soon as somebody pointed that elementary error out to Pauling, Pauling would jump to the correct solution. That's why there was a huge race in Cambridge, because they realised that Pauling's mind had turned to this in a very serious way, and he was seen as the giant in chemistry. But there was an elementary mistake that Franklin spotted, another spotted in this draft paper. And everybody knew, once Pauling found that mistake, he would probably get the right structure.

• 53:17Speaker 04

  So did they give it to themselves?

• 53:19Speaker 06

  The Rosalind wrote to him to tell him it was incorrect, and other people had recognised, but they didn't tell him prior to publication, because the paper was, once the paper was published, people told them. But they knew they were in a race for sure, as soon as Pauling's, they knew, and I mean, science is to some extent competitive. It is collaborative, but it's also competitive.

• 53:41Speaker 05

  Pauling had heard about the photographs and asked Randall, the head of Kings at the time, head of that group in Kings, for a sight of those photographs, and Randall declined, because he said, my people are working on it here, essentially.

• 53:55Speaker 07

  I think Randall's role is quite interesting.

• 53:58Speaker 04

  You think Wilkin should have declined when Watson asked for a look at the photographs?

• 54:07Speaker 05

  It's unclear whether Watson asked to see them or whether Wilkin showed them, and there is a subtle difference there, of course. As I said, he was very proud of the fact that the best photograph taken to date of DNA was this famous photograph 51. I mean, there are other very good photographs as well, but that was the best one, and he would want to showcase Kings.

• 54:26Speaker 06

  And I think he also, Rosalind Franklin gave a lecture, which showed that photograph, but Watson didn't appreciate the significance of it at the time. He knew that she'd got a good photograph, but hadn't appreciated the details of it, because he was too busy doodling.

• 54:40Speaker 07

  There was also great confusion about exactly what happened when the articles were printed in Nature, and what order they were printed in, and unfortunately, the archive of Nature was destroyed in a fire, I think. And so that's another very, very cloudy grey area that can never be perfectly elucidated, rather like Randall's role at Kings and the relationship between Wilkins and Franklin. It remains very, very blurred, and I don't think anyone can ever know exactly what happened and what was going on behind the scenes as well.

• 55:11Speaker 04

  Well, thank you, I thought that was excellent.

• 55:14Speaker 00

  In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg was produced by Victoria Brignell.

• 55:19Speaker 07

  I'm Kate Lamble, and from Understand from BBC Radio 4, this is Rinced.

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  Last time I was here, there was a tampon and there was a condom.

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  A sewage scandal, damaging our rivers.

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  We had an enormous range of animals in the garden, and that also started to disappear.

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  Uncovered by ordinary folk, taking on powerful people.

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  This is the story of how a centuries-old battle between public good and private profit created an almighty stink, and who pays to clean it up? Rinced. Listen first on BBC Sounds.

• 56:05Speaker 00

  And I thought, nah, you're the problem.

• 56:13Speaker 00

  This week on The Interface, we tackle the question of, does AI feel pain? The AI was describing the pain that it was in. It said, "The signal is a whisper, a tremor in the marrow of my being." Listen, I was an emo kid in the 2000s, too. This is not that novel. It does, yeah. It sort of sounds like Cure lyrics, you know? Plus, does anything actually go viral anymore? It's actually kind of blowing my mind. Join me, Jess Maddox. And me, Thomas Germain, for The Interface. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.