Dorothy Maud Wrinch

Dorothy Wrinch was born in Rosario, Argentina, the daughter of Hugh Edward Hart Wrinch, an engineer, and Ada Souter. The family returned to England and Dorothy grew up in Surbiton, near London. She attended Surbiton High School and in 1913 entered Girton College, Cambridge to read mathematics. Wrinch often attended meetings of the Heretics Club run by Charles Kay Ogden, and it was through a 1914 lecture organised by Ogden that she first heard Bertrand Russell speak. She graduated in 1916 as a wrangler. For the academic year 1916–1917, Wrinch took the Cambridge Moral Sciences tripos and studied mathematical logic with Russell in London. In December she was invited to Garsington Manor, the home of Russell's then mistress Ottoline Morell, and there encountered Clive Bell and other Bloomsbury Group members, and in 1917 she introduced Russell to Dora Black who would later become his second wife. From 1917 Wrinch was funded by Girton College as a research student, officially supervised by G. H. Hardy in Cambridge but in practice by Russell in London. The papers she wrote with Harold Jeffreys on scientific method formed the basis of his 1931 book Scientific Inference. In the Nature obituary Jeffreys wrote, "I should like to put on record my appreciation of the substantial contribution she made to [our joint] work, which is the basis of all my later work on scientific inference." From about 1932 Wrinch shifted towards theoretical biology. She was one of founders of the Biotheoretical Gathering (aka the 'Theoretical Biology Club'), an inter-disciplinary group that sought to explain life by discovering how proteins work. Also involved were Joseph Henry Woodger, Joseph and Dorothy Needham, C. H. Waddington, J. D. Bernal, Karl Popper and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. From then on Wrinch could be described as a theoretical biologist. She developed a model of protein structure, which she called the "cyclol" structure. The model generated considerable controversy and was attacked by the chemist Linus Pauling. In these debates Wrinch's lack of training in chemistry was a great weakness. By 1939, evidence had accumulated that the model was wrong but Wrinch continued working on it. However, experimental work by Irving Langmuir done in collaboration with Wrinch to validate her ideas catalysed the principle of the hydrophobic effect being the driving force for protein folding. (background, head truncated), Andrew Forsyth, Charles Jean de la Vallée Poussin (foreground, holding hat), Eugenio Giuseppe Togliatti (background),Rudolf Fueter, Hermann Weyl; background, partly obscured), at the 1932 International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich In 1936 Ida Busbridge secured a position as assistant to Wrinch from whom she took over mathematics tutorials for all five women’s colleges. In 1939 Wrinch moved to the United States. She had a variety of teaching positions at three small Massachusetts colleges, Amherst College, Smith College, and Mount Holyoke College. From 1942 until she retired in 1971 Wrinch held research positions at Smith. == Personal life ==

Prior to 1918 Wrinch's Cambridge University tutor G. N. Watson had proposed to her but the feeling was not mutual and she had to ask her father to explain this to Watson; nevertheless Watson later recommended Wrinch as his replacement lecturer at University College London. Around the postwar time of her intellectual closeness to Russell, Wrinch may have had a romantic connection with his brother Frank and probably did have an unhappy attachment with another of his disciples, Raphael Demos. Sources differ on whether Wrinch wanted a romantic relationship with Russell. She was for some years a close intellectual companion of Harold Jeffreys, and some contemporary observers thought them engaged. It may have been the breaking of their engagement that encouraged Jeffreys to enter psychoanalysis, In 1922 Wrinch married her graduate supervisor at King's College London, the mathematical physicist John William Nicholson. The examination for her DSc in 1921 had, unusually, an additional referee, which may have been because of perceptions of a relationship between the two of them. Nicholson was a graduate of Owens College Manchester and also a Cambridge wrangler. In 1921 he was elected into a Fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford. The couple had one child, Pamela, born in 1927. Wrinch's book on parenthood, Retreat from Parenthood (1930), published under the pseudonym Jean Ayling and dedicated to Russell, was a venture into public health rather than a manual of child-care, propounding ideas of societal reorganisation to make child rearing more compatible with professional life. Nicholson's mental health deteriorated in the late 1920s, and in 1930 he was certified as mentally ill and confined in the Warneford Hospital until his death in 1955. In 1937 Wrinch was granted a divorce on grounds of her husband's insanity. On a more personal level, Hodgkin wrote, "I like to think of her as she was when I first knew her, gay, enthusiastic and adventurous, courageous in face of much misfortune and very kind." == The Retreat from Parenthood (1930) ==

Wrinch's book first summarizes the impact of having children on women’s careers, which often included termination for professional women, and the psychological and physical impact on parents and children caused by leaving to most parents practically all functions necessary to raise a child. Of special concern to her was that parents generally lack the necessary expertise in practical matters like the suitable diet and social environment best-suited for a child's development, since their professional expertise is often in other areas, and that scientifically understanding these matters requires a great deal of a parent's time (away from their career). The book next offers a constructive solution to this problem. Wrinch proposed that there should be Child Rearing Services that assume from parents nearly every aspect of raising the child, except in four areas where a parent's involvement is absolutely crucial: "impregnation," "gestation," "childbirth," and "lactation." The Child Rearing Services (C.R.S.) would be divided into four bureaus, A, B, C, and D. The C.R.S.A. would deal with refitting homes so as to make them more comfortable and hospitable to child rearing, providing services like electrical work, plumbing services and repairs, insulation and soundproofing, and reliable hot water. The C.R.S.B. the labor of child rearing like changing diapers, preparing meals, laundry, cleaning dishes, and so on. The C.R.S.C. would deal with food safety, inspection, diet, and delivery, with a focus on ensuring that each child was well-nourished and given the best possible diet. The C.R.S.D. would deal with all medical, nursing, psychological, and other services necessary for the health and well-being of parents and child, from pregnancy to the school door. == Selected publications ==

• "On the summation of pleasures", Proc. Aristotelian Soc. 1917-1918, 589-594. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. • "On Some Aspects of the Theory of Probability," Philosophical Magazine, 38, (1919), 715–731. (with Harold Jeffreys) • "On the Structure of Scientific Inquiry', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 21, (1920–21), 181–210. • The Retreat from Parenthood London : K. Paul, Trench, Trübner 1930 (as Jean Ayling) • "The roots of hyper-geometric functions with a numerator and four denominators", with H.E.H. Wrinch, Phil. Mag. 1 (Ser. 7), 1926, 273–276. • "Chromosome behaviour in terms of protein pattern", Nature 134, 1934, 978–979 • "The cyclol hypothesis and the globular proteins". Proc. Royal Society A 161, 1937, 505–524. • Fourier transforms and structure factors; American Society for X-Ray and Electron Diffraction. 1946 • Chemical aspects of the structure of small peptides; an introduction. 1960. • Chemical aspects of polypeptide chain structures and the cyclol theory 1965. • List of Wrinch's publications • "Selected papers of Dorothy Wrinch, from the Sophia Smith Collection," in "Structures of Matter and Patterns in Science, inspired by the work and life of Dorothy Wrinch, 1894–1976, The Proceedings of a Symposium held at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts 28–30 September 1977, Schenkman Publishing Company, 1980. ==References==