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Maurice Wilkins
A graduate student at King’s College assigned to assist Rosalind Franklin with her research in X-ray crystallography, and the man who eventually helped her to capture and develop Photograph 51. Portrayed in the play as earnest, helpful, and eager to please, Gosling is often the first character to step outwards from the action of the play to offer commentary on the events being portrayed. Rather than appearing as a know-it-all, however, Gosling’s comments on the events of Rosalind Franklin’s life and career are meant to bring to light the parts of Rosalind’s story that have often gone overlooked. In this respect, Gosling assists Rosalind in death just as he did in life—by lifting up her voice and her work—and attempts to atone for the mistakes he made in sharing her work without her permission. Gosling is rattled by Rosalind’s cancer diagnosis, knowing that his repeated warnings to her to avoid the beams of their X-ray machine during her research went ignored time and time again. Despite his youth, Gosling is intelligent, warm, and focused intensely on the values of collaboration and openness in his workplace. He represents hope for the future of the scientific profession and the scientific community more largely.
Ray Gosling Quotes in Photograph 51
The Photograph 51 quotes below are all either spoken by Ray Gosling or refer to Ray Gosling. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Photograph 51 Quotes
ROSALIND. It’s absurd, isn’t it? Archaic! […] This business of the senior common room…
GOSLING. I suppose. But ... you can’t worry about it. […] It’s not like biophysicists have such great conversations at meals anyway. They tend just to talk about the work. They never take a break.
ROSALIND. But those are precisely the conversations I need to have. Scientists make discoveries over lunch.
Related Characters:
Rosalind Franklin (speaker), Ray Gosling (speaker), Maurice Wilkins
Page Number and Citation:
15-16
Explanation and Analysis:
On her first day at the laboratory, Rosalind is informed she’ll be assigned to a specialty other than the one she believed she’d been brought on to research, condescended to on the basis of her sex and her religion, and, finally, excluded from joining her colleague Maurice Wilkins in the all-male common room for lunch. In this passage, as Rosalind expresses her frustration to her assistant Ray Gosling, Ziegler investigates the ways in which sexism perpetuates itself in the workplace as women are excluded from opportunities for community, collaboration, or advancement.
This passage also gives insight into Rosalind’s unyielding commitment to her work. One of the main reasons why she feels slighted in this instance is because she fears that being unable to socialize and collaborate with her male colleagues means that her research will suffer. Unlike some of her more ambitious male colleagues, Rosalind’s primary motivation is a genuine love of her work and an interest in benefitting humanity through her research.
Rosalind’s desire to work alone and isolate herself in the laboratory is not a product of coldness or an antisocial disposition—rather, it is a defense mechanism that she’s developed in order to prevent herself from feeling helpless and excluded in a cutthroat, sexist environment. Even as Wilkins claims to want Rosalind as a partner and an equal, he excludes her from spaces where the “discoveries” of science actually happen—and this contributes to how she’s underestimated and denigrated in their professional circle.
ROSALIND. As a girl, I prided myself on always being right. Because I was always right. I drove my family near mad by relentlessly proposing games to play that I’d win every time. […] And when I was at university, and it was becoming as clear to my parents as it always had been for me that I would pursue science, I left Cambridge to meet my father for a hiking weekend. (Staring again at the image.) And atop a mountain in the Lake District, when I was eighteen years old, he said to me, “Rosalind, if you go forward with this life… you must never be wrong…”
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Explanation and Analysis:
WILKINS. But what are we celebrating??
GOSLING. It’s amazing, really—
ROSALIND. Have some faith in me. There is something to celebrate. Take a leap of faith.
WILKINS. (Bitterly.) As though you would ever do that. […] I mean, my God, can you even hear yourself? The irony?
ROSALIND. (Slowly.) I take a leap of faith every day, Maurice, just by walking through that door in the morning ... I take a leap of faith that it’ll all be worth it, that it will all ultimately mean something.
WILKINS. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
ROSALIND. No, you wouldn’t.
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CASPAR. Watson and Crick got hold of the paper Rosalind had written. It was confidential.
CRICK. It wasn’t confidential. Another scientist at Cambridge gave it to us. […]
WILKINS. Well it wasn’t published, that’s for sure. And it included [….] information that became critical to your work.
WATSON. I’m sure we would have gotten there sooner or later, even without it.
WILKINS. So would we have done, with the benefit of your work. You had ours but we didn’t have yours!
WATSON. There was no “we” where you were concerned. […]
GOSLING. Anyway, it doesn’t matter how they got the paper, only that they got it.
CASPAR. And that Rosalind didn’t know she should be in a hurry.
ROSALIND. I think I’m thinking about how I’ve come to the end of thinking. […]
WILKINS. We could talk it through. It might help. […]
GOSLING. For a moment, everything stopped. Different ways our lives could go hovered in the air around us. […]
ROSALIND. You know, I think I am going to call it a night. I haven’t been home before midnight for a fortnight and really what’s the point of being here and not getting anywhere? […]
GOSLING. And then there was only one way everything would go.
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GOSLING. There’s no science that can explain it. Loneliness. […]
CASPAR. Rosalind? (She clutches her stomach.)
WATSON. It works, Francis. It works. (A very long beat.)
CRICK. It’s ...
WATSON. I can’t believe it.
CRICK. It’s life unfolding, right in front of us. (Rosalind doubles over in her chair, and gasps.)
CASPAR. Rosalind?
WILKINS. It’s the loneliest pursuit in the world. Science. Because there either are answers or there aren’t.
ROSALIND. If I’d only ...
GOSLING. Been more careful around the beam.
WATSON. Collaborated.
CRICK. Been more open, less wary. Less self-protective.
CASPAR. Or more wary, more self-protective.
WATSON. Been a better scientist.
CASPAR. Been willing to take more risks, make models, go forward without the certainty of proof.
CRICK. Been friendlier.
GOSLING. Or born at another time.
CRICK. Or born a man.
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Ray Gosling Character Timeline in Photograph 51
The timeline below shows where the character Ray Gosling appears in Photograph 51. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Photograph 51
...chaos, reconstructing the background of Rosalind’s decision to venture to London. Don Caspar and Ray Gosling join the fray and continue telling the story of Rosalind’s arrival in London. Gosling tells...
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...him, Rosalind turns icy and angry. Even as Wilkins introduces Rosalind to her own assistant, Gosling, Rosalind remains irate. She explains that she was told she’d be in charge of her...
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...really lay in store for her. The men begin ribbing one another and arguing until Gosling steps in and reorients the action back to Wilkins’s and Rosalind’s “dank cellar” of a...
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Gosling, hoping to cut the tension in the room, declares that it’s already two in the...
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Rosalind asks Gosling what Wilkins is like, knowing they’ve worked together for a long time. Gosling tells Rosalind...
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Gosling comes forward to describe a correspondence Rosalind took up with a doctoral student in biophysics...
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Gosling steps forward and says that Rosalind was often away—sometimes she’d phone the lab after failing...
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Back in the lab, Gosling helps Rosalind set up an X-ray shot. Frustrated with his work, Rosalind moves him aside...
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...whose drive to unlock the secrets of the world parallels and rivals Watson’s own. As Gosling steps forward to comment on the men’s partnership, he seems to envy their “impressive” bond...
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Later on, in another part of the lab, Wilkins asks Gosling how he’s supposed to get any work done if all his time is spent apologizing...
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Sometime later, Rosalind and Gosling peer at an X-ray image they’ve developed—it seems to show DNA in two forms. Caspar...
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...models, instead simply focusing on determining what she could see. As the days go by, Gosling and Wilkins pressure Rosalind to hurry up and make a model—the other researchers in their...
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Back at King’s, Gosling excitedly shows Rosalind the most recently developed X-ray photograph they’ve taken of DNA. As they...
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Back in the lab, Rosalind puts Photograph 51 away in a drawer. Gosling asks if they should show it to Wilkins, but Rosalind doesn’t want to do so....
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...methods which make “no room for … humanity.” He storms out of the lab, furious. Gosling steps forward. Later that night, he reveals, he slipped Photograph 51 to Wilkins, believing the...
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...forward, claiming that he didn’t give Watson the photograph until Watson asked for it directly—but Gosling steps up and cuts him off, reporting that later that same week, Don Caspar arrived...
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...too, are planning another crack at a model—using the research Wilkins has shared with them. Gosling steps forward and states that what Watson and Crick are neglecting to mention is that...
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Time moves forward. Gosling explains that things begin moving “quickly” as Watson and Crick get their hands on Rosalind’s...
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...and Crick invite their colleagues from all over England to Cambridge. Rosalind, Wilkins, Caspar, and Gosling all pay them a visit. Rosalind is in a good mood—she flirts with Caspar, openly...
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Back in London, Rosalind and Gosling are at work in the lab—or, rather, Rosalind is hovering over their newest X-rays while...
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...offers to help Rosalind talk her thoughts through. After a moment of hesitation in which Gosling remarks that the “different ways [all their] lives could go hovered in the air,” Rosalind...
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...careful around the X-ray beam, collaborated, been less wary (or perhaps more wary). Or, say Gosling and Crick, if only she’d been born at another time or as a man, she...
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Gosling steps forward and says that Rosalind never went to Leeds—she died that April at 37...
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