Saving St. Germ (19 page)

He’d looked at her, replied, “You are wrong. Whatever happens, even if one has to go on like a body without a soul, one must work just the same.”

So now she worked on alone. She was the first woman given a position in higher education in France. Immediately after Pierre’s death, she was named professor at the Sorbonne, given her husband’s chair in physics. At the first meeting of her course, she began her lecture on the theory of ions in gases at the precise point where her husband had ended his final talk on the same subject. The day of this lecture, the auditorium was a circus; reporters and curiosity seekers shoved in beside the students. Curie received a standing ovation when she walked in. But she refused to acknowledge the waves of emotion—she gave her lecture in the coolest possible tones, then exited the lecture hall with dignity. Class, you say. Style, character.

But the same reporters who’d earlier questioned her ability to take over her husband’s position now complained that she had no feelings, she was “cold.” Was she a woman or not? What kind of woman
is
a scientist, anyway?

How could any man have imagined that this was the same Marie Curie who frightened her sister nearly out of her wits shortly before the Sorbonne lecture? Marie called her into the bedroom one evening, begging for help. Before her sister’s eyes, Curie opened a parcel she’d been carrying next to her heart for days and days. The parcel contained Pierre’s bloody clothes and the doctor’s linens used to wrap his crushed head. She pulled out the clothes, stiff with blackened gore, crying that she could not let go these remnants of her husband. Her sister knelt beside her, trying to quell her hysterical weeping, then gently put a scissors in her hands, helped her cut the clothes to pieces, toss the pieces in the fire. From one of the last folds of cloth, fragments of brain matter fell free; Curie held them to her lips, hunching over like an animal, making inarticulate sounds; the sister dragged the clothing and the scissors away from her and cut the final pieces, stuffed them into the fire.

But Curie gave the lecture. She betrayed no emotion at all, she discussed ions and gases. She went back to the laboratory. She put her hands, her bare hands, on the radium, on its “cool light.” She did the work, the work that killed her. I turned my back on the books, leaning against them, breathing hard. If my mood was melodramatic this morning, I’d indulge it, I’d go further into hell. I spun around again and stabbed with my finger, hitting Einstein, his
Collected Papers,
containing his early correspondence with his first wife, Mileva Maric.

Ah, Einstein. Harpo Marx-ish angelic face, Daddy of the Universe, everybody’s favorite genius—licking a big cone of vanilla ice cream, his wise eyes alight beneath that great halo of wild white hair. How he spoke in Great Quotes! God does not shoot dice with the universe! Could anyone not adore this gently mischievous, dreamy old guy who refused to wear socks? I pulled his
Collected Papers
out of the shelves and turned pages.

In 1896, Albert met Mileva Maric at the Federal Technical Institute in Zurich. She was Serbian: striking—long dark hair and deep eyes in a wide cameo face—and as smart, it seems, as he. Intellectually compatible with Einstein, and three years older. She’d been a child prodigy in math and science, she was sent to the Institute as its only woman student. He fell in love with her for her beauty and her brains and her maturity, and she reciprocated, she loved him, though she was funny about it—my favorite thing. Mileva had a sense of humor. “I’m from a little country of bandits,” she’d say to people, by way of introduction. And when Einstein complained to her, in a letter, about the world’s blindness, she wrote back: “I do not believe that the human brain is to be blamed for the fact that man cannot grasp infinity.” It was conditioning, she said. Infinity would be in man’s grasp if “when he was learning to perceive, the little fellow had not been so cruelly confined to the earth ... or among four walls, but instead was allowed to walk out a little into the universe.”

They were both nonconformists. Einstein was a high school dropout—his Great Youthful Quote was “School is no place for inquiring minds,” he found his teachers repressive and conventional-minded, and so did she. They were bohemians, meeting in the cafés, two young physicists who talked about the cosmos the way most people talk about their front yards. They formed a club, an “Athenaeum,” a sort of esthetics-minded café gang that met to talk about music and art and philosophy.

When Mileva became pregnant, in May 1901, this idyllic, gently rebellious student world changed, at least for her. She went home to her parents in Serbia, and Albert went home too, to persuade his parents to bless the marriage. Einstein’s mother disapproved of Mileva, the marriage, all of it. When she said no to the union, did Einstein fly to his lover, to be by her side for the birth of his daughter? No, Einstein stayed where he was, trying to persuade Mama to relent—but by then Lieserl had been born (without her father present). Lieserl had been “given up” (it seems she was sent to Serbian relatives, then put up for adoption), and because of the elder Einsteins’ objections, and intervening wars, was lost to her parents forever. Mileva and Albert did finally marry, and had two sons, Hans Albert and Edouard, before they split up—but what happened to Lieserl? Mileva had wanted her baby to be a girl. She went through a long, difficult labor and then she held her daughter safe in her arms. And Einstein wrote that he had no wish “to part with her.” Tell me, does God not play dice? Did their lost daughter ever read that quote? Neither a birth certificate nor a record of her death can be found.

I try again to imagine Mileva at school—the only woman at the physics institute, trying to keep her sense of herself intact, walking into the laboratory, where the scowling professors waited, smiling at everyone, cultivating a thoughtful anonymity, trying not to be called upon. But she was a scientist, after all—her courage came from her calculations, from her proofs. She could answer questions; she could find solutions. Forgetting herself, her sex, she’d rise to her feet sometimes, filled with a fervor to explain an unorthodox answer (for, like Einstein’s, her mind worked in unconventional, metaphoric ways) and in the narrow aisle, she’d stumble a little, grasp the desk for support. Mileva limped slightly: a condition resulting from a childhood fever. As a toddler, in Serbia, she’d been nicknamed La Petite Boiteuse, The Little Lame Girl. It was supposed to be a fond diminutive, but sounded cruel. She became even more self-conscious, having lost her balance now; her voice lost authority, but she went on speaking. Over in the corner of the classroom, Albert mugged at her, made a funny face at the professor’s back. She laughed aloud at his antics (“Oh that Einstein fellow!”)—and went on with her explanation.

So they fell in love. Often they hiked together in the Swiss mountains, and they took a trip to Lake Thun of a weekend. I can see her: At a café she sits next to him, surreptitiously pulls down her cotton lisle stocking and brown kid pump and feels for the yellowed callus on the sole of the foot of her shorter leg, a callus formed by the regular plunge and shock of her limp. She is wearing shoes that do not fit her correctly, worn for style, just once, rather than sensible support. She pulls up her stocking, shrugs, puts her hands behind her head. Her foxish face is sunburned, her grin lopsided. He is bold-eyed, inquisitive, bristling with energy, his tie and collar askew. Even his mustache looks off-center. Occasionally, he shivers a little, an involuntary twitch—stares into space then, laughs nervously. He takes an orange from her and nibbles on it, pretending to eat it all. They both burst into laughter. They are so young. What have they been talking about all afternoon, these two lovers on the beach, familiar as sweethearts painted on the lid of a taffy tin? Molecular motion, differential equations, double integrals, thermal motion. Parasols, prams, a man with a cart selling ices. The possibility of relative motion in the universe.

But Pauline Einstein threw herself down and sobbed like a child. “She is a
book
like you!”—Yes, Mileva was a
book:
an intellectual, and also she was a shiksa, a Serbian, of uncertain class; she was
forward
(competing with men!), she limped ... And
more
—Pauline Einstein had guessed (though her son denied it vehemently) that the two were sexually intimate. Her son was sleeping with this shiksa Serbian limping scientist. Mileva represented bohemianism, feminism, the demimonde—and Mother said to Albert, “If you get her with child, then you’ll be in a pickle!”

Mileva worked on a scientific project with a colleague and signed her papers Einstein instead of Maric. Another friend asked
why.
Because we are
ein stein,
she said, we are
one stone.

In Einstein’s first papers on the special theory of relativity, Mileva signed as Maric, as co-author, according to the Russian physicist Abram Joffe, who saw all submissions to
The Annals of Physics,
where Einstein’s breakthroughs were published. The papers were published under Albert’s name only; the original manuscript somehow disappeared. After their divorce, when he won the Nobel Prize in 1921, he gave all the prize money to Mileva. He spent the rest of his time trying to create his doomed unified field theory, and she retired into obscurity. Let me ask you a question: Does God play dice with women’s lives?

Well, that was a long time ago, Ollie. Beyond the usurpation of Curie and the tragic mystery of Mileva Maric Einstein must stand—who? A contemporary woman? That makes sense. And let’s rig it even more—let’s posit a scientist who’s an unmarried woman, single and independent, tough-minded. None of this soap-opera, weeping-into-the-beakers stuff! Surely, for a woman scientist like
this,
life and work would be easier?

I turn again and slide my finger blindly till it stops at the famous team of Crick and Watson and immediately the name “Rosalind Franklin” leaps to my mind. It would not do so normally. The only reason it leaps to mine is because here in my hands is a biography of Rosalind Franklin by a woman named Anne Sayre, a friend of Rosalind’s. OK, we are in a different, more contemporary time, the fifties—close to our own. We expect that women will be more accepted in the academy, in the laboratory, right? We expect that this accomplished woman, educated at Cambridge, whose chosen milieu was biology—or rather, what we would now call molecular biology (emphasis on X-ray diffraction, with specialized work on subcrystalline materials)—would have an easier road?

Rosalind Franklin, after all, had claimed her independence early. She did not marry; she devoted her life to science, and when she went from Cambridge to the prestigious Randall Laboratory at King’s College, she had set her goal: to do research on DNA. Everybody who knew Rosalind knew that she was tough, the stuff out of which great scientists are made; hers was the illuminating research on DNA—she, in fact, produced on an X ray the first image of the double helix. Why, then, don’t we all know her name, the way we know Crick’s and Watson’s?

Because she did not discover DNA; they did. Or at least that’s the way it’s gone down in the history books. Yet her research was central to the discovery of DNA—what happened? What happened was this. Anne Sayre sets it out carefully. Rosalind did not get along with her Randall associate, Maurice Wilkins. Wilkins refused to view Rosalind as anything other than his assistant, though she was brought into the Randall lab to pursue her own research. To say that there was friction between them would be like describing the
Titanic
as a minor boating accident. Wilkins had enormous trouble accepting a woman as a partner in science, particularly a woman of confrontational style with no time to flatter the male ego.

Meanwhile, over at Cambridge, the team of Watson and Crick decided to jump into the search for DNA, which Franklin and Wilkins had begun at King’s. Watson attended Franklin’s seminars; the two utilized her already completed research in their experiments. There is nothing to indicate that Rosalind ever knew, ever noticed. Watson got to know Wilkins and sympathized with him for having to put up with such a shrew. Sayre’s book says he commented that Wilkins was being put through “emotional hell” by Rosalind’s unorthodox temperament.

On February 6, 1953, Watson paid a visit to Maurice Wilkins at King’s College and Wilkins allowed him to look at an X-ray photograph that belonged to Rosalind Franklin. The X ray showed a B-form diffraction pattern suggesting a helical pattern containing two, three, or four coaxial nucleic-acid chains per helical unit and having the phosphate groups, or the bases, in the center and the backbone on the outside of the structure. When I read this description (Rosalind’s own, straight from Anne Sayre’s book) I get the shivers. Rosalind was
right there.
She had it in her hands. We have Wilkins himself describing it:

I had this photograph and there was a helix right on the picture, you couldn’t miss it. I showed it to Jim, and I said, “Look, there’s the helix, and that damned woman just won’t see it.” He picked it up, of course.

Hey, he picked it up. Later, Wilkins said that he regretted having shown the photograph to Watson. He said that “perhaps” he should have asked Rosalind’s permission. No shit. I have to admit, I’m looking at this series of events from the perspective of current attitudes on what we call scooping in up-to-the-minute science. Things
were
a little freer then—but showing someone’s research to a competitor? Without asking permission? It’s true that now scientists “edit” their conference seminars, only hinting at “hard” information, so as not to hand the competition one’s edge. Submissions to technical scientific journals are logged in with a date and a time, and remain unopened until the last minute, to protect the authors from a scoop. Rivalry is fierce—research grants and fellowships, prize money, etc., are limited; it’s ugly out there.

But Rosalind was working away, unaware of Wilkins’s “tip” to Watson. If it had mattered to her, I can’t imagine what form her protest would have taken: Her lab was enamored of regular “interim reports.” In December of 1952, the head of the lab had published a report covering recent work done and included her findings. And even before Christmas the same year, Wilkins sent drawings of the “B” patterns in squid sperm to Crick. Wilkins was a real hot source. And, the biggest question in this biographical sleuthing: What became of an interim annual report written by Rosalind Franklin a full year before Wilkins showed Watson the X ray—in fact, interpreting the B-form diffraction pattern as a “helical structure.” She
did
know. But why did she wait?