Let the spots on the photograph decide
Aphorism
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Secured Birkbeck's largest polio research grant
4 milestones
Won major funding to study polio, accessing live virus resources at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
With Raymond Gosling, worked through DNA diffraction pictures and produced draft manuscripts outlining two helical forms
Studied under Adrienne Weill and Marcel Mathieu, shifting from coal work toward crystallography techniques.
Assistant research officer at BCURA during National Service, applying helium methods to quantify holes in coal.
I am a chemist and X-ray crystallographer. My research science reveals the molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal and graphite from the patterns X-rays leave on film.
When an asymmetrical A-DNA image in May 1952 contradicted the accepted helix, I followed the data, and marked it with a mock funeral notice for the "crystalline" helix.
I held that model building in structural science should start only once enough of the structure is known from experiment. Two failed triple-helix DNA models bore that out.
In 1947 I joined Jacques Mering's laboratory in Paris, where I learned to apply X-ray diffraction to amorphous, disordered substances such as carbon — the skill my later research relied on.