In praise of the physicists who contribute to the advancement of life science

Wally Gilbert

While writing about the “man of sequence”, Frederick Sanger, in the series of Hitler’s gift, I mentioned Walter (Wally) Gilbert (see photo), who shared the Nobel Prize (chemistry) with Sanger in 1980 for devising a method of sequencing the bases in DNA.  Although he is not a so-called gift from Hitler, he is a physicist who contributes to the advancement of life science—also my favorite topic.

Lawrence Bragg

Numerous astonishing discoveries in life science depend on the diffraction of x ray of crystal structure and this technology comes from the father and son (William Henry & William Lawrence Bragg) who discovered the diffraction principle, for which they shared the Noble Prize (physics) in 1915.  Lawrence Bragg (see photo) is still the youngest Nobel laureate at age of 25 to this date.

Lawrence Bragg (see photo) was the director of the Cavendish Lab (at Cambridge University) when James Watson and Francis Crick (also a physicist by training, see photo) were trying to figure out the DNA structure, Max Perutz was deciphering the hemoglobin structure, and John Kendrew myoglobin.  These two pairs were awarded Nobel Prizes (medicine & chemistry) in 1962.  All of them depend on x ray crystallography.  (Watson and Crick went to Perutz’s Lab.)

Francis Crick

Without x-ray crystallography, which is based on Bragg’s diffraction theory, Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkin couldn’t make the beautiful x-ray crystallography of DNA, and Watson and Crick (see photo) couldn’t come up with the DNA structure that “changed the course of the life science history”.

Dorothy Hodgkin

Dorothy Hodgkin (see photo) was also awarded a Nobel Prize (chemistry) in 1964 for her x-ray analysis of complicated molecule, vitamin B12 (cyanocobalamin) specifically.  British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, studied x-ray crystallography under Dorothy Hodgkin at Oxford University before she went into politics.

Let this serve as the introduction of the series of “In praise of physicists who contribute to the advancement of life science.