A trio of talks commemorates the pioneering crystallographer, who died half a century ago.
Anna Winterbottom
On 14 April a meeting at King’s College will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Rosalind Franklin. Molecular geneticist Noreen Murray will discuss Franklin’s inspiring role for women in science (also celebrated by the Rosalind Franklin Award), Ellen Solomon will speak on Franklin’s legacy for genetics and medicine, and Franklin’s co-worker Ray Gosling will recall their work in elucidating the structure of DNA.
Gosling worked closely with Franklin during her two years at King’s. They produced photographs of DNA that ‘screamed double helix’ and without which he is convinced Crick and Watson’s famous model would have been impossible. Gosling remembers what a ‘shattering’ development this was, calling it ‘the first time the dominant species has held the key to evolution’.
In a world in which the possibilities and challenges of genomic data are immense—not to mention the negative effects of Watson’s recent inflammatory statements is more vital than ever to keep in mind Franklin’s emphasis on careful adherence to the experimental data and on ‘playing devil’s advocate’ by considering all possibilities.
Search for a scientist
By 1950, John Randall’s team at King’s was pulling together after Maurice Wilkins and Gosling obtained an X-ray diffraction photograph of a sample of pure DNA. To complete the project, Gosling remembers, they needed a first-rate X-Ray crystallographer, ‘someone with a bit of imagination’.
Franklin was known for her work on coals and chars begun in 1938 during her PhD at Cambridge and applied at the Coal Utilisation Research Association (CURA) and, after 1947, at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l’État in Paris. Randall wrote offering her a Turner-Newall fellowship and in 1951 she took up the post at King’s with Gosling as her PhD student.
Search for a structure
Gosling laughs about the media fixation on ‘photo 51’, the image that became iconic after its 1953 publication in Nature along with the accompanying papers by Watson and Crick and Wilkins, Stokes, and Wilson. At the time, it was one picture among the many obtained from the hydrogen-filled micro-focus cameras as Franklin and Gosling carefully controlled humidity levels and took the sodium salt of their DNA specimens through various levels of water content.
The achievement of Franklin’s skilful control of water levels was to distinguish the ‘A’ and ‘B’ forms of DNA: a task essential to visualising the structure of either. Following Franklin’s constantly held dictum ‘let the results speak for themselves’, she initially focused on measuring the beautiful crystalline form of ‘A’ using the Patterson function (a version of the Fourier transform used to measure inter-atomic distances).
While the pair were scrutinising the images, Wilkins was inspired by the models pioneered by Watson and Crick in Cambridge. Gosling says the first of these models—a triple helix—was a perfectly logical guess but incorrect. ‘God didn’t want a rigid structure,’ he jokes.
But then a second model came along. Using data from the King’s lab, Watson and Crick proposed the double helical structure with the unique pairing of the heterocyclic bases that we know today. A trip up to Cambridge after an excited phone call about this model was when all the pieces fell into place for both sets of researchers.
Despite these fruitful collaborations, Wilkins’ enthusiasm for model-building sat ill with Franklin’s emphasis on rigorous experimentation and J. D. Bernal’s 1953 offer of work at Birkbeck was a welcome chance for her to take up the challenge of investigating RNA in the tobacco mosaic virus. Franklin elucidated the helical geometry of the RNA and demonstrated that it carried the infectivity or genetic information. This is the achievement of which Franklin was most proud at her early death in 1958 and which is celebrated on her tombstone in the Jewish cemetery in Willesden.
What would Franklin have thought?
Reflecting on recent developments such as the sequencing of the human genome, Gosling says he ‘would give anything to know what Rosalind would have thought’. The ethical implications are immense: legislation against ‘genetic discrimination’ is already beginning, while debate rages over whether to allow the creation of clones and chimeras for medical research.
Gosling, who considers global coordination to prevent the misuse of genetic information to be ‘more important than global warming’, is convinced that Franklin—always passionately interested in the applications of her work—would have urged further international coordination and cooperation to ensure the knowledge of the great double helix she helped unravel is used to benefit humanity.