In 1913, having spent long hours working in a freezing cold laboratory on Woodhouse Lane, Leeds, father and son physicists William and Lawrence Bragg made a ground-breaking discovery for which they received the Nobel Prize in Physics two years later. Their development of X-ray crystallography, a method which uses the scattering of X-rays to reveal the atomic arrangement of crystals, not only transformed our understanding of matter but also opened up an exciting new field of research in which a generation of young scientists went on to make a name for themselves. One of these was Professor Tony North, who started his career working with Lawrence Bragg before coming to Leeds in 1972 to lead the Astbury Centre for Structural Biology. On Thursday 30th January Leeds Phil and Lit Society will be hosting an event in which I’ll be in conversation with Tony as he shares his recollections of this journey which not only saw him pioneering the application of computing to biological structures, but rubbing shoulders with a fair number of Nobel Prize winners on the way…
Month: January 2025
The Struggles of Sisyphus: the Tragic Tale of Friedrich Miescher
Having just finished working on a new book with my co-author Prof. Ralf Dahm, all about little known 19th century Swiss scientist Friedrich Miescher who discovered DNA in 1869, I had my first dabble with ChatGPT to generate an idea for the cover. Having died at the tragically young age of 51 and burdened by a growing sense of never having fulfilled everything he had hoped to achieve, Miescher once compared his struggles to those of Sisyphus, the figure in Greek mythology who was punished by the gods of Olympus to spend eternity rolling a boulder up a mountain slope. We’re hoping that the book will be published in 2025 and although we’re unfortunately not going to be able to use this image on the cover, I wanted to share it anyway!
