The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,66

a structure? He had offered her DNA.

When Wilkins returned from vacation, he expected Franklin to join him as his junior assistant; DNA had, after all, always been his project. But Franklin had no intention of assisting anyone. A dark-haired, dark-eyed daughter of a prominent English banker, with a gaze that bored through her listeners like X-rays, Franklin was a rare specimen in the lab—an independent female scientist in a world dominated by men. With a “dogmatic, pushy father,” as Wilkins would later write, Franklin grew up in a household where “her brothers and father resented R.F.’s greater intelligence.” She had little desire to work as anyone’s assistant—let alone for Maurice Wilkins, whose mild manner she disliked, whose values, she opined, were hopelessly “middle-class,” and whose project—deciphering DNA—was on a direct collision course with hers. It was, as one friend of Franklin’ s would later put it, “hate at first sight.”

Wilkins and Franklin worked cordially at first, meeting for occasional coffee at the Strand Palace Hotel, but the relationship soon froze into frank, glacial hostility. Intellectual familiarity bred a slow, glowering contempt; in a few months, they were barely on speaking terms. (She “barks often, doesn’t succeed in biting me,” Wilkins later wrote.) One morning, out with separate groups of friends, they found themselves punting on the Cam River. As Franklin charged down the river toward Wilkins, the boats came close enough to collide. “Now she’s trying to drown me,” he exclaimed in mock horror. There was nervous laughter—the kind when a joke cuts too close to the truth.

What she was trying to drown, really, was noise. The chink of beer mugs in pubs infested by men; the casual bonhomie of men discussing science in their male-only common room at King’s. Franklin found most of her male colleagues “positively repulsive.” It was not just sexism—but the innuendo of sexism that was exhausting: the energy spent parsing perceived slights or deciphering unintended puns. She would rather work on other codes—of nature, of crystals, of invisible structures. Unusually for his time, Randall was not averse to hiring women scientists; there were several women working with Franklin at King’s. And female trailblazers had come before her: severe, passionate Marie Curie, with her chapped palms and char-black dresses, who had distilled radium out of a cauldron of black sludge and won not one Nobel Prize but two; and matronly, ethereal Dorothy Hodgkin at Oxford, who had won her own Nobel for solving the crystal structure of penicillin (an “affable looking housewife,” as one newspaper described her). Yet Franklin fit neither model: she was neither affable housewife nor cauldron-stirrer in a boiled wool robe, neither Madonna nor witch.

The noise that bothered Franklin most was the fuzzy static in the DNA pictures. Wilkins had obtained some highly purified DNA from a Swiss lab and stretched it into thin, uniform fibers. By stringing the fiber along a gap in a stretch of wire—a bent paper clip worked marvelously—he hoped to diffract X-rays and obtain images. But the material had proved difficult to photograph; it generated scattered, fuzzy dots on film. What made a purified molecule so difficult to image? she wondered. Soon, she stumbled on the answer. In its pure state, DNA came in two forms. In the presence of water, the molecule was in one configuration, and as it dried out, it switched to another. As the experimental chamber lost its humidity, the DNA molecules relaxed and tensed—exhaling, inhaling, exhaling, like life itself. The switch between the two forms was partly responsible for the noise that Wilkins had been struggling to minimize.

Franklin adjusted the humidity of the chamber using an ingenious apparatus that bubbled hydrogen through salt water. As she increased the wetness of DNA in the chamber, the fibers seemed to relax permanently. She had tamed them at last. Within weeks, she was taking pictures of DNA of a quality and clarity that had never before been seen. J. D. Bernal, the crystallographer, would later call them the “most beautiful X ray photographs of any substance ever taken.”

In the spring of 1951, Maurice Wilkins gave a scientific talk at the Zoological Station in Naples—at the laboratory where Boveri and Morgan had once worked on urchins. The weather was just beginning to warm up, although the sea might still send a blast of chill through the corridors of the city. In the audience that morning—“shirttails flying, knees in the air, socks down around his ankles . . . cocking his head like a rooster”—was a biologist Wilkins