Archive: Rosalind Franklin

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0:56Now all of Sheeran's supporting acts have dropped out too. For more, listen to The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your pods. 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 crystallographer, for many years she was overshadowed by male scientists.

1:39It's widely thought that her key role in revealing the structure and functionality of DNA was underplayed for decades. The challenges which women faced 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 crystallography at King's College, she found her work blighted by overbearing male supervisors who would seek to take credit for her work.

2:21But 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 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. 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.

3:09It 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 Farrar, President of the British Society for the History of Science, Jim Naismith, Interim Leader of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, Director of the Research Complex at Howell and Professor at the University of Oxford, and Judith Howard, Professor of Chemistry at Durham University.

3:52Patricia Farrar, what was Rosalind Franklin's upbringing? 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.

4:34She loved them a lot. The only thing she ever resented, or the main thing she ever 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 ten, 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 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.

5:08The 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 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 anti-Semitism. 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.

5:54She went up to Cambridge in 1938 to read natural sciences. How unusual was that for a woman at that time? 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 in the whole university. There were only two women's colleges then, Newnham 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 so to study the sciences was a very very unusual thing to do.

6:43Remembering my own experiences as a physics undergraduate at Oxford was vast again still vastly outnumbered by men. What mattered isn't the number of men it's the attitudes towards the women. So 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 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. She didn't get, they weren't allowed to get degrees they got diplomas for instance.

7:21That'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 practiced at Cambridge today, but no women were allowed to participate in that before 1948. Given that it was unusual for a woman to study natural sciences at Cambridge, how did she come to want to study that? Because that was what she'd loved ever since she was a small child. She was absolutely passionate about science.

7:56She 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. She wrote somewhere that it was her passion. It was almost like a religious faith, this desire to find out about the world. 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 at university and did a sort of work. Can you develop what she did there?

8:31Yes, 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 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-graphitizing 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.

9:37And she did all the work that sort of predicted and unpacked that as to what type of coal you had. What do you think did that happen? 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 happen? 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.

10:09In that research as a young woman, is she doing things, is she going into territory that hadn't been explored before? Yes, she had been known about this puzzle about the porosity of coal, but she really mapped that out and published single author papers as a PhD student. and just after her PhD in what was called the British Coal Investigations, and these were her work. They were seen as her work, and she was recognised for it at the time. She researched, for much of her career, she researched using X-ray diffraction. Could you explain what that means and how she used it? So X-ray diffraction is...

10:48Is this when she's in Paris and when she's in England as well? She began that work in Paris. She went to Paris for four years. with Meering, 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, 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 a molecule so it's incredibly useful and what she learned in Meering'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 Meering's lab established why coals would graphitise and why they wouldn't.

11:55So she had known that you could, 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. So those four years in Paris were very advanced learning for her. Paris was a good place to go for x-ray work, of course. 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. Judith Howard, can you tell us more about crystallography and X-ray in terms of her increasing absorption in the subject?

12:35Well, we've heard that she was taught really, apart from her undergraduate learning that she would have done in Cambridge, she was taught by Mearing and Mathieu in Paris and they were experts in this field of disorder. Disorder? The non-ordered material, such as coal. 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-graphitic type of carbons which were used at what we call molecular sieves today.

13:15And 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 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. 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?

14:01Well, what she was trying to determine was the order of the atoms inside the structure, 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, the types of coal and their properties, their function, was vitally important at the time of the war.

14:49Tell me anything from her notebooks or from the letters Patricia mentioned at the beginning of the programme about her love for crystallography and how it grew. 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 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.

15:28So 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 Barris and just after? 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 fibre.

16:10The sample has to be supported in some way so that you can direct the beam at it in an ordered way. And those were, to some extent, made by her. And she understood them, she knew how to deal with them. But 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 fibres later were about 100 hours, which seems amazing today. And, of course, we didn't have the computers. A lot of the... Principally, the work was done by hand. We had, if you like, a mathematical formulae to work from, but we didn't have the computers.

16:51Today, 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 not surprisingly over 50, 60 years the technology has moved on, which makes us able to look at materials in a different way and to be able to look at structural evolution over time, over temperature and so on. It's not a different science fundamentally, but the way it's used is different today. Patricia, Farah, can we just dwell on Paris a little bit?

17:31Because 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. What else did she enjoy in Paris? The life in Paris, because she was not in England? 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 compartmentalised. 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.

18:12I think in Paris, those two came together, and there wasn't the 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, men and 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. Was it quite an advanced community of scientists working with X-rays at the time?

18:53Was she within? Oh, she was at the cutting edge of that particular area of science. She was doing very, very advanced work. It was seen as being very, very important. And she really 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. Can pop music ever be apolitical? I'm Tristan Redman. And I'm Asma Khalid, and together we host the Global Story podcast from the BBC. One of the most successful pop stars in the world, Ed Sheeran, is facing the biggest controversy of his career because the rapper Macklemore has been dropped from tour after he made pro-Palestinian comments on stage.

19:39Now all of Sheeran's supporting acts have dropped out too. For more, listen to The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your pods. See them. Jim, in 1951 she did come back to England, to London got a job at King's College where 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? Because by that stage we had worked out that that was the information transfer What do you mean by that? 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's been a big puzzle for many years about how that information, what was the basis of hereditary and by this stage by 1950s it was understood that this was DNA so there was a tremendous excitement to work out.

20:47It was understood that this was DNA but they didn't know what DNA was? Correct. So why did they call it, why did they it was understood it was DNA? I don't get it. 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? 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 they were doing primitive transfer experiments and they had worked out that DNA contained an instruction book for life, but they had no idea how it worked.

21:23And as Judith had said, the ability to see molecules in three dimensions tells you how they work. That's a chemist's belief. Were those who were working on it aware of how dramatic and how very important this was going to be if discovered? I think so. Or when discovered, yeah. 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. Judith, can we come back to women and crystallography? Quite a few women went into crystallography.

22:02Was it that it had a particular allure for them, or was it an accident, or where are we? 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.

22:38She was already, but she didn't live long enough to become a household name, let's say. Well, she is, but differently. Dorothy Hodgkin, Kathleen Lonsdale. and there were not only the Braggs but Bernal, Max Proutes, the great names that we know in the subject were encouraging to the women to join them. Patricia Parra, 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? 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.

23:21And then they 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. 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.

23:59They 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. And the daily working arrangements, as you alluded to briefly earlier at that college, were, we think, it was antediluvian, but it's in a lifetime. Women were not allowed into the college.

24:37Can you tell us? 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 happens. 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. There was quite a sort of drink and blokey sort of culture 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 party. She just wasn't part of the social group. And that quite rapidly can make somebody feel very isolated.

25:18The one person who remained extremely loyal to her throughout was a PhD student, Ray Gosling. And it was Ray Gosling who took the famous photograph and he really admired her and liked her a lot. And we now come to this photograph, Jim Neismith, photograph 51. Can you tell us about that? 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.

25:56And 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, the difference between A and B, if I imagine a bath towel soaked in water and I turn it into a wrap, swirl it around my hand while it's a nice sausage shape, if I squeeze it, the water comes out and the towel shortens. So A-form is like a twisted, squeezed out with less water in it and slightly shorter shape. B-form is the swollen, full of water form.

26:36But B-form 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. Do you have any record of what Rosalind Franklin thought when she saw it? She realised 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.

27:19And 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. Judith Howard, 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? Yes, I think in an unguarded moment one could say that Wilkins had shown Watson, who was visiting King's, this famous 51 photograph.