Rosalind by Jessica Mills

Author:Jessica Mills [Mills, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Legend Press
Published: 2024-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

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Crystalline

King’s College London, The Strand, 1 May 1952

That morning, the mahogany box where the tabulations for our calculations are stored ricochets off a table leg in the room next to my office and falls upside down on the floor. It’s the era of automation, but still we aren’t able to produce complex atomic vector maps at the click of a button. Bessel functions, which we can use to plot the atomic distances in a molecule, are only tabulated on the paper system up to forty microns. We must slowly and precisely do all the calculations by hand to determine the distance between the atoms.

The scores of paper Beevers-Lipson strips that are kept in the mahogany box are dispersed unevenly on the ground and are now lying face down in the puddle of water from the leaking roof, absorbing moisture from the leak like Litmus strips. The stagnant pool is gradually fading the printed trigonometric expressions on the paper pieces, which are essential to sine and cosine arithmetic. Without them, a day’s sums will take a week.

Raymond is standing by the box with a concerned look on his face.

‘That will put us back by at least a day,’ he says, waving at the mess.

‘Hurry and pick them up before the ink fades,’ I urge him.

‘The darn things are so fiddly,’ he complains while getting down on his knees to help rescue the strips.

‘Why don’t you take the slides to the dark room, if it’s still open, to develop the negatives?’ I suggest once we’ve collected the limp paper pieces and spread them on the windowsill to dry.

He’s delighted at any excuse to avoid my acrimony. When he’s gone, I spread the existing list of calculations out onto the laboratory bench and peer at them to judge what is missing. They are the fruits of our attempts so far to plot out the position of the atoms in DNA.

Doing the calculations by hand isn’t the fastest way to conclude a theory. We are working blind; starting from the numbers, and extrapolating outwards, with no map to guide us other than the X-rays themselves. But working backwards from a model would only leave room for error, it would be guesswork and we would have no proof that it was right.

However, little by little, with consistent effort, the truth is sure to reveal itself from the numbers. Numbers are firm and immutable. I trust them more than feelings. They don’t bend or twist, like emotions. Emotions flit and curl and seep from the seams. They are fallible in ways that numbers aren’t. Numbers hold their weight. They blend and subtract from others in a logical and hermetic world that’s reassuringly predictable. Life’s secrets are hidden in the data.

‘Dr Franklin,’ Raymond says minutes later.

‘Can it wait?’

‘It’s the filament. It’s burned.’

‘What do you mean it’s burned?’

‘It’s burned through, Dr Franklin.’

The X-ray filament had incinerated ten days ago during one long photographic exposure. The filaments have an average lifespan of just 250 hours, it turns out.

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