Free Rosalind Franklin by Brenda Maddox Page A

said she would regard it for me as a sort of “family function” — apparently the only acceptable occasion for a night. She had already refused nights for other people.’
    In Cambridge as in London, Rosalind found herself surrounded by relations or those claiming to be so. Attending an engagement party for a refugee couple, she was hardly in the door when the hostess, a woman from Breslau, said ‘tell me all your genealogy. I want to know if you are connected with someone called Ellis Franklin.’ At a tea party a Roger Hartog appeared and claimed to be a third cousin. And ‘Who and what is Dr Redcliffe Salomone? I know him by sight, but that is all. I have been asked, through a 3rd person, to go to lunch with him some time.’
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    Rosalind threw herself into her courses: chemistry, physics, mathematics and, having bought some good instruments, mineralogy. She signed up for extra chemistry and a course in scientific German. She had come to the right place.
    Cambridge had been pre-eminent in mathematics since 1669 when Isaac Newton, at twenty-seven, became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. In 1851 Natural Sciences were added to the tripos (honours examinations named after the three-legged stool on which eighteenth-century students sat to be examined). In 1871 the Cavendish Laboratory was founded, with James Clerk Maxwell, who unified the theories of electricity and magnetism, as its first professor of experimental physics. In 1897 at the Cavendish, J.J. Thomson discovered the electron, opening the way for the development of modern physics.
    Plunging into work at university level, Rosalind had the common freshman experience of thinking that everybody else was better prepared. Overwhelmed, trying desperately to keep up with the reading in order to understand the laboratory assignments (the ‘practicals’), she decided she had been poorly taught at St Paul’s, especially in laboratory techniques. The elegant new science block at her old school now seemed ‘to be all show and nothing in it’. She was very glad she had not wasted another year at school.
    At the same time she welcomed the stimulation of the university environment. She joined the Archimedeans, a mathematics society, and went to ‘a most exciting’ lecture on the theory of fluorescence, and another on penguins and whales. She listened to the prevailing great names of Cambridge science, including J.J. Thomson and J.B.S. Haldane, whose mathematics she couldn’t follow, and went to a meeting of the Association of Scientific Workers ‘over which Prof. Bragg is presiding’.
    This occasion gave her a look at the father (with an assist from his own father) of X-ray crystallography. In 1915 William Lawrence Bragg, at twenty-five, had shared a Nobel prize with his father William Henry Bragg for demonstrating the use of X-rays for revealing the structure of crystals.
    Bragg’s Law, named after Bragg junior, not senior, builds on the fact that a crystal by its nature suggests an orderly pattern of atoms inside. When X-rays are shone through it, the atoms diffract — that is, scatter in particular directions — and leave spots on a photographic plate. Bragg’s equation relates the positions of the spacing of the atoms and thus to the structure of the molecules that make up the crystal.
    Rosalind was eager for such knowledge and technique (which would form the basis for her entire body of professional work). As an undergraduate she knew she was beginning at the beginning. In her new notebook which she headed ‘Mineralogy’, she wrote at the top of the first page, ‘What is a crystal?’
    Had she asked herself ‘What is a crystallographer?’, she could have profited from talking with Bragg’s son Stephen. Assessing his distinguished father, he judged: ‘By and large, people who choose to go into science are not greatly interested in psychological problems ... He