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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…

Rubbing shoulders with giants: the scientific odyssey of Professor Tony North through molecular biology

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!

Whilst attending the unveiling of a new memorial in Duthie Park, Aberdeen to the scientists who in 1922 developed the first medically useable insulin, I got my chance to say thank you to one of them – native of Aberdeen and later, Professor of Physiology at the University of Toronto, John James Rickard Macleod. (Incidentally, that’s my insulin pen in my hand, not a vape I’m offering him.)

The following day on a return visit to the park, a sudden bout of hypoglycaemia in close proximity to Macleod’s statue resulted in a letter about his work in the Financial Times…ah well, as they say, every cloud….

At the start of September, I was honoured to be invited to a ceremony attended by delegates from Toronto, the Canadian Consul for Scotland, dignitaries from the City of Aberdeen, and representatives from the Nobel Foundation at which a new memorial was unveiled in Duthie Park, Aberdeen which is truly a world first. It is the first and only memorial to date which names all four members of the team of Toronto-based scientists who, in 1922, developed the first medically useable insulin.

One of these was John James Rickard Macleod who was a native of Aberdeen but had become Professor of Physiology at the University of Toronto where, in 1923, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with his colleague Fred Banting for their work on insulin. But following the award of the prize, what had already been a strained and often acrimonious relationship with Banting deteriorated even further with the result that in 1928, Macleod returned to his home city of Aberdeen where in 2023 the John Macleod Memorial Statue Society commemorate his vital contribution to medicine by unveiling a statue by local sculptor John McKenna in Duthie Park.