Review: Honest Jim?
Author(s): Jerry Donohue
Reviewed work(s): Rosalind Franklin and DNA by Anne Sayre
Source: The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 51, No. 2, (Jun., 1976), pp. 285-289
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2823632
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THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY
VOLUME 51
JUNE
1976
NEW BIOLOGICAL BOOKS
The aim of this departmentis to give the reader brief indications of the character,the content,
and the value of new books in the various fields of Biology. In addition, there will occasionally
appear one longer critical review of a book of special significance. Authors and publishers of
biological books should bear in mind that THE QUARTERLYREVIEW OF BIOLOGY can notice
in this departmentonly such booksas come to the office of the editors. All material for notice
in this departmentshould be addressedto The Editors, THE QUARTERLYREVIEWOF BIOLOGY,
Division of Biological Sciences, State University of New York,StonyBrook, N. Y. 11794, U.S.A.
HONEST JIM?
By JERRY DONOHUE
Departmentof Chemistry,University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19174
A Review of
DNA.
By Anne Sayre. W. W. Norton & Company,New York.
$8.95. 221 p.; ill.; no index. 1975.
About eight years ago there appeared in these pages
a review by Gunther Stent of James D. Watson's The
Double Helix, cast as a review of the reviews, and
it is with his blessing that this review is cast in the
same format. Stent remarked then that The Double
Helix had furnished one of the major conversational
topics in biological circles at the time. As everyone
knows by now, Rosalind Franklin and DNA is causing
even more of a brouhaha. But, because it seems
unlikely that it, too, will be selected by the Book-ofthe-Month-Club, it is unfortunately not destined to
have as wide an audience as that Watson work which
moved Anne Sayre to write this quite different version
of what led up to the discovery of a double helical
structure for DNA. In particular, she concerns herself
with the contribution Rosalind Franklin made to what
has been termed, rather hyperbolically, the most
important discovery of the century in genetics. By
now it is well known that the book by Sayre is an
effort to set the record straight by chronicling a part
of Rosalind Franklin's life and showing how different
things were from the way they were described in
The Double Helix.
It is far from clear that the nine reviewers treated
below were really reading the same book, variously
characterized by them as "polemical," "strident,"
"without shrillness," "with an elegant writing style,"
"tendentious," "impassioned," "methodical," "reROSALIND FRANKLIN AND
285
markable for its content and readability," "of literary
distinction," and "able and high-minded." All of these
reviewers selected quotations from the book that they
deemed important in making their points. In a sense,
then, this review is largely an extract of the extracts.
The most widely read review was probably that
by Arthur Cooper in Newsweek(September 22, 1975),
entitled "Mad Scientists." (This immediately conjures
up a vision of a Grade B movie, with George Zucco
and Lionel Atwill playing the principals.) The "mad"
scientists are, however, none other than Rosalind
Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, who hated one another
at sight, according to Sayre. Wilkins (according to
Cooper) was "the villain of the piece" because he
went behind his colleague's back to give Watson, their
competitor at Cambridge, copies of her x-ray pictures.
Cooper concludes that Sayre has argued a.persuasive
case for the crucial contributions of Franklin, as
opposed to Watson's description of her in his "gossipy
account" as a dowdy, rigid, aggressive, glorified laboratory assistant.
Writing in the Harvard Independent (Registration
Issue, September 1975) Abigail Zuger entitled her
review, "Unprofessional, My Dear Watson?" She states
that "Sayre's book casts damning aspersions on Watson's integrity, both as a researcher in 1953, and
as an author in 1968." The "Rosy" of Watson's book
was "rude, arrogant, and secretive," but Sayre protests
that this "dour 'Rosy' is a figment of Watson's imagination" and that in fact she was "an affectionate
human being, loved by her friends and . . . respected
by her colleagues." In a telephone interview Sayre
286
THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY
told Zuger, "A great deal of what he [Watson] wrote
is libelous." Zuger also points up the characterization
to Sayre by Crick of The Double Helix as a "contemptible pack of damned nonsense." The damage is the
misrepresenting of the scientific community as an
eat-or-be-eaten world, where the least scrupulous ones
get the biggest rewards, where the winners are the
nimble, and the losers the ethical: "A generation of
graduate students in science read The Double Helix
and learned a lesson: the old morality was dead."
Zuger concludes by relating that Watson is loath to
react to Sayre's charges. "'It's just too complicated,'
he stated quickly in a recent interview. 'She might
as well have her fun. No comment."' (Should one
term restitution of an assassinated character "fun"?
Furthermore, it's all really very simple.)
The feminist movement's outlook on this story is
not unnaturally emphasized in a review in Ms. (October, 1975) by Veronica Geng, called "The Biography-Expose," and another one in AWIS Newsletter
(July/August, 1975) by Ann Briscoe, entitled "To
Set the Record Straight." Geng touchingly says that
"Sayre transforms the mythical 'Rosy' back into Rosalind," while Briscoe says that she has "succeeded in
restoring to the memory of Rosalind Franklin her
identity, her creditability, her greatness." Briscoe also
observes that what "Anne Sayre has done is to establish
beyond question from evidence in Rosalind's dated
notebooks, that it was her data, supplied improperly
(without her knowledge or permission) to Watson
by Wilkins, which provided the essential evidence
at the crucial time for Watson and Crick to emerge
as the architects of the DNA structure." (When Briscoe
says "to Watson" here, what should have been said
was "to Watson and Crick," for whatever culpability
there is in the receiving of stolen goods should be
shared equally.)
Both Geng and Briscoe emphasize the feminist
angle, doubtless clued in by the blurb on the dustwrapper: "A vivid view of what it is like to be a
gifted woman in an especially male profession." This
issue, however, is not the central one of this book,
and it is unfortunate that reviewers should be misled
by phrases concocted in publishing houses and not
by their authors. Women's liberation makes for popular reading these days, and the story of Rosalind
Franklin in the male environment of King's College
is truly poignant, but what happened to her data
was not because of her sex-the same thing could
have happened had she been a male. Sayre quotes
from a review of The Double Helix in the Scientific
American by Anidr6 Lwoff, who was "uneasy about
the appropriation of Rosalind's data: 'It is a highly
indirect gift which might rather be considered a
breach of faith'" (p. 194). When the uproar arose
over the unauthorized transfer of data, Max Perutz
rather lamely explained his part: "I should have asked
[VOLUME
51
Randall for permission to show it to Watson and
Crick, but in 1953 I was inexperienced and casual
in administrative matters . . ." (p. 152). And Wilkins,
years later, in an interview said to Sayre, "Perhaps
I should have asked Rosalind's [sic] permission, and
I didn't. Things were very difficult. Some people
have said that I was entirely wrong to do this without
her permission, without consulting her, at least, and
perhaps I was . . ." (p. 151). Mea culpa, mea culpa!
The review of most general importance, probably,
is an untitled one by Deborah Shapley in The New
York Times Book Review (September 21, 1975). The
entire story is related by her in a matter-of-fact way,
but it comes as rather a shock to read that Rosalind
Franklin forfeited her eligibility for the Nobel prize
by dying in 1958. Shapley notes that The Double Helix,
"Watson's cheerfully catty memoir," is an "astonishingly readable book (especially for one written by
a scientist)." Her review, too, is surprisingly readable
(especially for one written by a reporter for Science).
Shapley zeroes in on the question of whether Rosalind
Franklin would have solved the structure of DNA
without the assistance of Watson and Crick, inasmuch
as Sayre writes that she "came very close between
January 1951 and March 1953 to solving the DNA
problem." This statement is followed by an excerpt
from a taped interview with Crick in which Sayre
asked him for "his estimate of the length of time
it would have taken Rosalind to arrive at a correct
structure for DNA pursuing the methods she was
using" (p. 214). Sayre, not being a crystallographer,
is to be forgiven for asking such a question. ("Dr.
Hodgkin, I understand that you have undertaken
to determine the structure of penicillin; would you
kindly tell me how long you think this will take?"),
but Crick's reply surely will be recorded in the history
of science as the most fatuous ever: "Perhaps three
weeks. Three months is likelier. I'd say certainly in
three months, but of course that's a guess." It would
not be unlike Crick to claim (now that it's been
suggested) that his reply was a leg-pull, but Sayre's
perception disavows this.
Shapley objects to Sayre's first chapter, which
attacks The Double Helix, as an "awkward, thinly
disguised harangue." Actually, it is none of these,
but a careful preface to the narrative which follows.
Shapley comes to the conclusion that "Sayre's account
shows Wilkins behaving in ways that few reputable
scientists, let alone few mature people, would admire,"
but she also believes that there is "a place for yet
another author to take up the story of DNA, this
time to explain Wilkin's role." Well, who?
We now come to a review in The New Scientist,
a periodical which, with its customary disdain for
objectivity, chose someone from, of all places King's
College, to write it. The author is one Farooq Hussain,
JUNE
1976]
NEW BIOLOGICAL BOOKS
and the piece is called "Did Rosalind Franklin Deserve
DNA Nobel Prize?" Hussain gives the opinions, but
not the names, of "the DNA scientists who worked
with Franklin at King's College." "[They] conflict
with Sayre's account on three grounds: that Franklin
had no exclusive rights to conduct DNA work, that
she did not suggest the helical structure of DNA,
and that claustrophobia rather than sexism may have
been the cause of her trouble at King's." Now, one
way to put someone down is to demonstrate that
something someone has written is wrong. Very well,
but in this case Sayre did not write that Rosalind
Franklin had exclusive rights to conduct DNA research. Quite the contrary, for we find her saying
"the question of in whose province DNA research
lay seems not to have been resolved" (p. 100); and
"Gosling does not remember that any particular lines
of demarcation concerning DNA work were ever laid
down [in a conference with Randall, the head of
the laboratory, Franklin, and perhaps others-the
narrative is unclear here], and in this Randall agrees
with him" (p. 101); and "he [Wilkins] may have been
somewhat surprised when he returned to find that
DNA had passed at least in part (emphasis added)
into her hands" (p. 101).
Second, to say that Rosalind Franklin did not
suggest a helical structure of DNA is to say that the
Interim Annual Report by Rosalind Franklin, 1952,
quoted at length by Sayre, pp. 125-6, is a forgery,
and that Aaron Klug manufactured the manuscript
discovered after Rosalind Franklin's death (see pp.
163-4). Of course, if Hussain meant that she did
not suggest "the" helical structure for DNA, Sayre
never said that either; but then Watson and Crick
also did not suggest "the" helical structure, but rather
"a" helical structure.
Finally, with regard to sexism, as Hussain terms
it, to argue that English society, and in particular
English society at King's College, was not at that time
masculine-oriented is completely ridiculous. Aha! says
Hussain, there were not just two women in the
biophysics department, as Sayre says, but seven! He
also says that up to 1971 only one woman had applied
to work with Wilkins. [Hmm!]
Hussain states that "Sayre's biggest failure,
however, is not to realize the full implications of
Franklin's claustrophobia." Sayre, in fact, refers to
this trait only twice-first (p. 56) as "mild" and second
(p. 203) as "not acute." Hussain says that "one person
[unnamed, of course] who worked in the next room
said that she [Franklin] often became agitated when
working alone, and that she did not wear the uncomfortable and restrictive lead protective garments." Is
he really implying that those garments contributed
to claustrophobia? Furthermore, everyx-ray laboratory has windowless rooms (we call them dark rooms),
but no x-ray crystallographers work "with minimal
or no lighting for long periods of time," as stated
287
by Hussain. Rosalind Franklin carried out years of
x-ray work on carbons in Paris with remarkable
success, and without the personality rancors which
arose at King's College. Moreover, the specter of
claustrophobia, a little of which is in all of us, has
hardly bothered, for example, several generations
of crystallographers at Cal Tech who happily worked
several floors underground for years without developing these clashes of temperament to be attributed
to this phobia. One is also led to wonder why this
supposed affliction led Rosalind Franklin to clash
only with Wilkins. Sayre writes that while she "made
no friends at King's, she did not acquire enemies
either. She came into conflict with no one except
Maurice Wilkins" (p. 99). What Hussain suggests must
therefore be a new malady, "selectoclaustrophobia."
Because he bases his article largely on material
supplied by "DNA scientists . . . at King's," "King's
College scientists," and "one person who worked in
the next room," one is forced to assume that this
is the official view of Biophysics at King's College;
it doesn't speak well for them that they have taken
the tack that, "well, if it wasn't this (sexism), then
it must be that (claustrophobia)." Rosalind Franklin
deserves better from them. Is their motto de mortuis
nil nisi malum? If they have something to say, let
them say it, and not feed undocumented innuendo
to The New Scientist.
A review by Seymour Cohen, a distinguished
microbiologist, appeared in the Washington Post (November 1, 1975) under the title "Double Helix, Double
Cross." (The Gestalt is beginning to take form, isn't
it?) Referring to The Double Helix, Cohen writes that
"it purported to be an autobiographical account of
how the discovery was made. . . . [It] now appears
that much of Watson's story is incorrect in many
He also picks up Crick's "conserious respects...."
temptible pack of damned nonsense" characterization. (He does not, on the other hand, pick
up Sayre's comment that The Double Helix "admittedly
is not a source which can be always taken literally"
[p. 148].) Crick and Wilkins, he says, are treated
"relatively kindly" by Sayre, but adds that she "believes
that Watson carelessly robbed Rosalind of her personality, however, and this does not strike me as a
virtuous act." Cohen concludes that "Sayre's detective
work and analysis will be a valuable reference work
for historians of science and psychoanalysts of scientists for years to come" and hopes that "Sayre's book
will be read widely (and The Double Helix reread),
at the very least by scientists and graduate students,
some of whom may have thought that The Double
Helix provided an excellent guide to scientific
achievement, fame and fortune."
Writing in The New YorkReview of Books(November
13, 1975), erstwhile scientist and novelist C. P. Snow
288
THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY
accordingly writes literature cum book-review, called
"The Corridors of DNA" (whatever that means). Here
we find Crick to be a "generous-minded man, as
expansive as the young Rutherford," and learn that
Wilkins "behaved in the highest spirit of scientific
candor, very much as Darwin and Wallace behaved
to each other." Snow thinks The Double Helix unfair
to Crick, "who is a much deeper and more complex
character than Watson suggests." (This surely is the
novelist Snow speaking here; he likes Crick because
he is a wonderful character, making the "novelist's
finger itch.") He also feels that The Double Helix is
unfair to Bragg and Bernal, "without whom none
of this work could have happened." It must also be
unfair, then, to such persons as Euler, who evaluated
emr,and Eastman, who was responsible for x-ray film;
they provided two of the basic tools of x-ray crystallography. Bragg admittedly was one of the midwives
attendant at the birth of x-ray diffraction, but Bernal's
later work contributed nothing at all to what Watson
and Crick were doing. Snow believes that "the story
would have been a sweeter one if Crick, extremely
easy with women, had [instead of Watson] conducted
the visits to King's [in search of information]."
(Alternatively, it also might have been sweeter had
Rosalind Franklin been fifteen years or so younger.)
Snow also points out that Rosalind Franklin took
a month off in 1952 to tour Yugoslavia, and then
strongly implies that no scientist on the verge of a
great thing-"as with Chadwickworking twenty hours
a day to identify the neutron"-would do such a
thing; so it is clear she didn't know she was close
to anything, he opines. On the contrary, no scientist
says to himself or herself, "Next week or month I
am going to make a fantastic breakthrough, and I
shall therefore keep my nose to the grindstone and
my body in the laboratory uninterruptedly." Actually,
if something exciting appears to be developing, a
cruise along the Dalmatian coast is just what is needed
for sorting things out. Moreover, Snow neglected to
notice that at almost that very same time Wilkins
went off to Brazil for a month and Watson took
a vacation in the Italian Alps; so they, too, it is clear,
didn't know that they were close to something big.
Snow also touches on the feminist aspect, saying
by way of apology, "Wilkins was not a man to be
comfortable with female aggression." He also comments that a woman, Dorothy Hodgkin (Nobel
laureate, 1964), "worked happily in Bernal's laboratories." Let us now reverse this (is the following version
even remotely possible?): "Hodgkin was not a woman
to be comfortable with male aggression." Snow quotes
an evaluation of Rosalind Franklin as given to him
by Bernal, in whose laboratory at Birkbeck College
she worked after leaving King's College: "A very good
scientist, not a great one," and that "he would have
been shocked if she hadn't been given her share of
[VOLUME
51
a Nobel Prize," two very Sage observations, even if
contradictory.
Helen Berman's review in Science (November 14,
1975) is a masterpiece of understatement and restraint. Berman, one of the more able of the younger
generation of structure analysts, calls her review "A
Restitution." Sayre, she says, "tells us with considerable scholarship, about Rosalind Franklin the scientist
and the person." Berman comments that the separation of the men from the women at King's College,
with concomitant loss of communication, stands in
marked contrast to Rosalind Franklin's later effective
collaboration at Birkbeck College, where 'no such
segregation existed. She also picks up Crick's guess
of ". . . perhaps three weeks," when responding to
Sayre's question about how long it would have taken
Rosalind Franklin to arrive at the structure of DNA.
What a pity that Sayre didn't pose to Crick a much
pithier question: "Dr. Crick, would you estimate how
long it would have taken you and Watson to arrive
at a correct structure for DNA had the two of you
been in a different laboratory where the conditions
were such that you had no one to talk to save each
other?"
The last pages of Sayre's book, according to Berman, question the effects of Watson's book on the
morality of young scientists, but she thinks it "unlikely
that a serious student of science would change [the]
way of approaching a research problem on the basis
of reading Watson's book." "The damaging aspect
of Watson's book," Berman writes, "was the case he
built against a person who figured prominently in
a scientific discovery." Berman does not, however,
as did Zuger, cite Sayre's relating of an experience
she had had in an open meeting of a local school
board (on Long Island, one assumes), where a man
stood up to demand that "science requirements for
girls be dropped from the high school curriculum
because he had a daughter, and 'he didn't want her
to grow up like that woman Rosy-what's-her-name
in that book."' Berman concludes that Sayre has
repaired the damage of the negative impression that
Watson left in his book, his tacked-on epilogue notwithstanding.
I would like to end with some observations of my
own. The first concerns whether anyone had the
so-called "exclusive rights" to work on DNA. The
King's College people are supposed to have said that
Rosalind Franklin did not have these. Of course, she
did not and never said she did. There is no such
thing as possession of exclusive rights to a research
area in science. Nevertheless, it is true that then,
as now, a research laboratory could delineate a
querencia and expect no one to encroach upon
it. I well remember the pique expressed years ago
by someone in the group at Birkbeck, where the
JUNE
1976]
NEW BIOLOGICAL BOOKS
pioneer work on the structure of ribonuclease was
going on, when another group in another country,
at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, started work
on the same protein and reported preliminary results
(of no particular significance) at a scientific conference. (Never mind that the structure was eventually
solved by neither of these groups, but in yet another
laboratory at a later time.) "Aren't there enough
proteins to go around?" he had protested. Such
pirating of problems simply was not done, especially
by gentlemen in English universities. This attitude
is the source of some of the resentment expressed
toward Crick and Watson, but which vanished when
they were successful. Meanwhile, however, according
to Sayre, on leaving King's College, Rosalind Franklin
was forbidden to work on DNA and was even forbidden to have any contact whatever with Gosling, the
graduate student with whom she had so amicably
worked at King's, the two of them having discovered
how to obtain from DNA the diffraction data without
which Watson and Crick would have discovered
nothing. Incredibly, "They were not to meet, they
were not to discuss orally or in writing anything
whatever. . . . This decree struck Rosalind as fussy
and tiresome-just the sort of thing they do there!"
(pp. 173-174). Fussy and tiresome indeed! Rosalind
Franklin not only had a sense of humor, but patience
more than most.
The second personal observation concerns what
has been generally termed (but never in print) "data
snitching"-i.e., the alleged surreptitious filching by
Watson and Crick of experimental data from King's
College, by paths described variously in The Double
Helix and in the numerous spin-offs from it. Whether
289
it happened because of Watson's snooping at King's,
or because of Wilkins showing Rosalind Franklin's
photographs about without her knowledge or permission, or because of Max Perutz distributing a
"non-confidential" report, is not germane. Rosalind
Franklin took it all with good grace; or very probably
she was not aware of what had gone on. Sayre states,
"She was beaten in the end by Crick and Watson,
who had in their success more help from her work
than she ever knew they had received" (p. 116). "She
was, in fact, profoundly innocent, she never asked,
never guessed, never was told" (p. 119). Suppose,
however, that the scenario had been something like
this, and the reverse had happened: Imagine that
by some misadventure Watson and Crick had collected
some genuine experimental data of their own and
that Perutz, or somebody, had transmitted these to
another group, somewhere, unbeknownst to Watson
and Crick, said group having next used them to come
up with a structure for some thing or another. Then,
when it became known that outsiders had used data
from the MRC in an unauthorized way, the resulting
explosion, I am sure, would have paled that of
Krakatoa.
To conclude, Sayre reported that "even now there
are high schools which use [The Double Helix] as
a collateral text" (p. 197), a procedure which is fine
for this "personal account of the discovery of the
structure of DNA." Now, however, I must urge, if
not insist, that anyone who has read, or is to read,
Watson's version of these events, must also read this
other version in Sayre's book, which, although it is
not racy or gossipy, is scholarly and eminently readable.