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HISTORY OF BIOLOGY: MAURICE WILKINS AND DNA

The following points are made by Walter Gratzer (Current Biology 2003 13:R945):

1) Maurice Wilkins sprang from nonconformist, Unitarian stock, and the austere Victorian moral principles that this background imposed marked him for life. He writes pleasantly of his happy and secure childhood in New Zealand and later in Dublin, London and Birmingham. By the time he was twelve he was building apparatus in his home workshop. A clergyman taught him to grind telescope lenses and the local blacksmith helped make the mounting for the instrument. Wilkins inevitably read physics in Cambridge, and like many of his generation, was drawn towards biology by Erwin Schroedinger's book, /What is Life?/ His first serious disappointment was his indifferent degree and failure to find a position in a laboratory in Cambridge. Searching despondently for jobs, he suddenly remembered that his undergraduate supervisor in Cambridge, M.L. Oliphant, now occupied the chair of physics at Birmingham University. Wilkins went to see him and was directed to a newly appointed lecturer by the name of John Randall. So began a close but never easy relationship that was to last for 40 years. Wilkins got his PhD in quick time, having had his first clash with Randall, over the authorship of a publication.

2) Came the war, and Oliphant's laboratory was directed to work on radar. It was there that Randall and Boot constructed the cavity magnetron, which more than any other invention helped to win the war. Wilkins, however, was shipped off to E.O. Lawrence's cyclotron laboratory in California to play his small part in the Manhattan Project. Returning, he rejoined Randall, then already professor of physics at St Andrew's University, and began a rather forlorn search for a research project with a biological thrust. His colleagues in the biology departments were of little help: when he asked the Professor of Botany what the size was of a nucleolus, he received the answer, "as big as a full-moon". But it was not long before Randall was appointed to the Wheatstone Chair of Physics at King's College and Wilkins was glad to come south. Randall deployed his formidable political talents to gather in funds on an unheard-of scale for the establishment of a biophysics unit in the subterranean caverns by the Thames. So successful was he, indeed, that the academic administrators took fright at such hubris, and the College Principal secretly (and unsuccessfully) begged the Medical Research Council to restrict Randall's funding. Yet Randall's judgement was far from infallible. Wilkins had been impressed by Crick, and urged Randall to offer him a position in the department, but the professor would have none of it, for Crick, he thought, talked too much.

3) After a period of rather humdrum labor on microscopy of cells, Wilkins at last found what he wanted: Avery had proved that DNA was the genetic material, and Wilkins resolved to study its structure. Soon he had made fibers and had begun to take X-ray diffraction photographs. Then he had a stroke of luck: he attended a lecture at which Rudolf Signer from Berne spoke about DNA, and handed out samples of his preparations, which were far less degraded than any that had been seen before. Signer's DNA, in the hands of Wilkins and his student, Raymond Gosling, produced X-ray diffraction pictures of startling quality, with well-resolved spots. The gene, Wilkins noted, was crystalline (as Schroedinger had prefigured).

4) But fate was already slipping the lead into the boxing glove. At this moment of high optimism Randall received an inquiry from a young physical chemist, with experience in X-ray diffraction of carbons. He suggested to Rosalind Franklin, for it was she, a feeble project involving X-ray scattering from protein solutions, but Wilkins pressed him to invite her instead to join in the work on DNA. Randall acquiesced with unaccustomed alacrity, and Wilkins eagerly awaited the arrival of a new colleague to share his labors and his enthusiasm.(1)

References:

1. Maurice Wilkins: The Third Man of the Double Helix. Oxford University Press 2003.

Current Biology http://www.current-biology.com

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ON ROSALIND FRANKLIN (1920-1958)

The following points are made by Lynne Osman Elkin (Physics Today 2003 March):

1) In 1962, James Watson, then at Harvard University, and Cambridge University's Francis Crick stood next to Maurice Wilkins from King's College, London, to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their "discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material." Watson and Crick could not have proposed their celebrated structure for DNA as early in 1953 as they did without access to experimental results obtained by Ring's College scientist Rosalind Franklin. Franklin had died of cancer in 1958 at age 37, and so was ineligible to share the honor. Her conspicuous absence from the awards ceremony -- the dramatic culmination of the struggle to determine the structure of DNA -- probably contributed to the neglect, for several decades, of Franklin's role in the DNA story. She most likely never knew how significantly her data influenced Watson and Crick's proposal.

2) Franklin expressed an early fascination with physics and chemistry classes at the academically rigorous St. Paul's Girls' School in London, and she earned a bachelor's degree in natural sciences with a specialty in physical chemistry. The degree was earned at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1941.

3) From 1942 to 1946, Franklin did war-related graduate work with the British Coal Utilization Research Association. That work earned her a PhD from Cambridge in 1945, and an offer to join the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de 1'Etat in Paris. She worked there, from 1947 to 1950, with Jacques Mering and became proficient at applying x-ray diffraction techniques to imperfectly crystalline matter such as coal. In the period 1946-49, she published five landmark coal-related papers, still cited today, on graphitizing and nongraphitizing carbons. By 1957, she had published an additional dozen articles on carbons other than coals. Her papers changed the way physical chemists view the microstructure of coals and related substances.

4) Franklin made many friends in the Paris laboratory and often hiked with them on weekends. She preferred to live on her own modest salary and frustrated her parents by continually refusing to accept money from them. She excelled at speaking French and at French cooking and soon became more comfortable with intellectual and egalitarian "French ways" than with conventional English middle-class customs. Consequently, she did not fit in well at King's College, where she worked on DNA from 1951 to 1953. Franklin chose to leave King's and, in the spring of 1953, moved to Birkbeck College. After the move to Birkbeck, she began her celebrated work with J. Desmond Bernal (1901-1971) on RNA viruses like tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). She was a cautious scientist who began to trust her intuition more as she matured. She published 14 papers about viruses between 1955 and 1958, and completed the research for three others that colleague Aaron Klug submitted for publication after her death.

5) In his obituary for Franklin, Bernal described her as a "recognized authority in industrial physico-chemistry." In conclusion, he wrote, "As a scientist, Miss Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook. Her photographs are among the most beautiful of any substances ever taken."

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