Ruminations

Another Time, Another Place

"If you had to point to the seminal discovery transforming biology and science in the previous century, the discovery of the double helix, in my mind, is No.1 as the most transformative discovery."
"And the fact that this woman's work was seminal to it, it is a remarkable achievement."
"[June Lindsey] blazed a trail for women long before gender equity in science became our era's clarion call."
Alex MacKenzie, molecular biologist, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute

"He [scientist Bill Cochran] was a quiet kind of person and they [double-helix Nobel prize winners James Watson and Francis Crick] ignored him. If anybody should have got the Nobel with them, it should have been him."
"I still feel that when women have children they should look after them. I am a bit old-fashioned like that."
"He [late husband George Lindsey] was streets ahead of me in ability. He could do anything. He could work in wood and marble and soapstone, he could write poems -- he could do anything."
June Lindsey, 96, 1940s Cambridge University alumni, Ottawa, Ontario

June Lindsey, still from video

June Lindsey -- at the time before her marriage, June Broomhead -- worked at the Cavendish Laboratory while she studied at Cambridge University in England. She was a gifted student for whom physics and math were an intellectual draw when she arrived from Yorkshire, England, to Cambridge University after winning the top science scholarship. When she completed her studies, sitting for the very same exams, competing in the same work as her male colleagues and earning high marks, she was nonetheless not awarded an undergraduate degree in 1944.

Women, at that time, though admitted to Cambridge to study were not granted degrees. They were permitted at that time for the last half-century to study at the university but degrees were withheld until 1948 when Queen Elizabeth was granted the first such degree, albeit an honourary degree in view of her station in life, not as a result of academic studies. One of a few women studying science and working at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, she was also working toward her PhD, and was but one of four women among a hundred men.

But she was in distinguished company, for among those doctoral students were many future Nobel Prize laureates. Around the same time as June Broomhead studied at Cambridge, Roselind Franklin contributed to the double helix discovery through her work on X-ray crystallography, credited with taking the X-ray that originally mapped out the double helix structure. Franklin died of cancer at an early age but awards and buildings were named after her, recognizing her contribution to science. Of her, June Lindsey has this to say: "I think she was overrated completely".

According to Lindsey, it was a student who had taken the X-ray that Franklin placed in a drawer, later to be retrieved by Crick and Watson and used in their work. After leaving Cambridge, Lindsey worked at Oxford University with another woman who would later win the Nobel Prize on determining the complex structure of B12, Dorothy Hodgkin. She moved among and worked around distinguished scientists and scholars and was herself in their league though recognition has eluded her, and it is this fact that has moved Alex MacKenzie to launch a campaign to correct that oversight.

June Lindsey, bottom left, in her days at the Cavendish Laboratory. She is at bottom left. Postmedia

In her research, she had delineated the precise shape and dimensions of adenine and guanine, two components critical to DNA, with the use of X-ray crystallography and precise calculations while a graduate student, mapping out their crystal structure. As well, she proposed the molecules were linked to one another with a series of repeated hydrogen bonds, representing an "overlooked prequel" to the discovery of the double helix. Her work, in other words, was what the scientists who discovered the double helix built their discovery upon.

When she made the observation relating hydrogen bonds binding the molecules she studied, a "critical epiphany" arose for American biologist James Watson and British physicist Francis Crick, later awarded the Nobel Prize, but who failed to make any mention of her work propping up their own. Both men were working at Cambridge's Cavendish Labs. Francis Crick worked right across the hall from where Lindsey did. "I didn't like him particularly. He ignored people like me", she recalled of those early years.

Historical writer Robert Olby wrote in his book The Path to the Double Helix, The Discovery of DNA, that Watson had consulted Lindsey's thesis shortly before the eureka moment leading to the double helix discovery. It was when he studied her work that Watson understood the hydrogen bonds could serve as the 'zipper' for the two nucleic acid strands that make up the double helix. "It is sad that the famous duo omitted to acknowledge their debt to Broomhead (Lindsey) and her colleagues", wrote X-ray crystallographer Durward Cruickshank in 2004.

Yet Lindsey herself nominates someone else for the honour of having led the two researchers to their discovery, unacknowledged and unsung, and that person was a Scottish scientist also involved in research at the Cavendish Laboratory. Bill Cochran built on the structure of hydrogen bonds and he worked out the complex mathematics needed to "extrapolate from the 'dots on paper' diffraction pattern to the elegant double helix structure", wrote Mr. MacKenzie. Cochran decided not to publish his results, handing them over instead to Crick and Watson.

Lindsey met her husband, Canadian nuclear physicist George Lindsey, while she was working at Cavendish Labs, and with him moved to Canada where soon after bearing children she left her scientific career behind to become a full-time wife and mother. George Lindsey did military defence work during the cold war, and as a polymath he helped to create sabermetrics. Their children have themselves gone on to academic careers.

As for her belated recognition and how she feels now about the past, she responded philosophically: "Well, I am being recognized. I didn't expect any of that. I think in those days you expected women not to be taken much notice of."