Tag: crystallography
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Kathleen (Yardley) Lonsdale DSc., FR
JMS PearceHull, England Kathleen Lonsdale (1903-1971) (Fig 1) like her contemporary Dorothy Hodgkin was one of the women pioneers in a man’s world of professional scientists.1 She developed original techniques in X-ray diffraction of crystals to determine the structure of a molecule. This led to studies of the benzene ring, structure of drugs, and investigations…
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Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin OM, FRS (1910-1994)
JMS PearceHull, England Dorothy Hodgkin (Fig 1), though not by religion, had close Quaker affinities through her marriage and through her spirited pacifism. She possessed a unique mixture of scientific skills that allowed her to extend the use of X-rays to reveal the structures of compounds, a technical venture far more complex than anything attempted…
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The first description of DNA: A six million dollar letter from Francis to Michael Crick
Marshall A. Lichtman Rochester, New York, United States In the April 25, 1953 issue of the biomedical journal Nature, three articles were published on the structural characteristics of DNA. One was a three-dimensional model of DNA constructed by James Watson and Francis Crick of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University, who did no experiments to arrive at…