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Does science advance thanks to lone geniuses and their Eureka moments?…or is it more like Sisyphus in Greek mythology, doomed by the gods to spend eternity rolling a boulder up a mountain slope? 19thC Swiss scientist Friedrich Miescher who discovered DNA and is the subject of the new book I’ve been working on with Ralf Dahm, tragically compared himself to the latter. For this reason, we were hoping to get Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the DNA double-helix on the front cover of our book, but as that hasn’t proved possible…

… I took up my pencil and paper and have been busy not just writing the book, but also drawing these figures for the close of each chapter…

…and if you’re wondering why Sisyphus has been transformed into a crash-test dummy…well, all is explained in the intro to our book…(in my first sketches, he looked too much like Iron Man!)

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….