Price: Free (Talk only) or £37.50 (Dinner) or £46.50 (Dinner with wine)
In 1913, having spent long hours working in a freezing cold laboratory on Woodhouse Lane, 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, whose university life began just after WWII with a BSc in physics at King’s College London. He completed his biophysics PhD there in 1955 on the structure of the fibrous protein collagen.
Early in his career, Tony worked with Lawrence Bragg at the Royal Institution in London, tackling the challenge of how to solve the structure of proteins – the giant molecules that function as nature’s nanomachines in living systems. After some years at the University of Oxford, in 1972, Tony continued the legacy that Bragg and his father had begun at Leeds, by becoming Head of the Astbury Centre for Structural Biology and he remained here until his retirement in 1996.
“I played a major role in finding the structure of lysozyme (the 3rd globular protein and first enzyme to be solved.) This was by far the most exciting part of my scientific life”.
His long involvement with the International Union for Pure and Applied Biophysics concluded with a 10-year term as Secretary-General up to 2002. He was a founder member of the Molecular Graphics Society. He is a former President of LPLS and an Honorary Life Member.
In conversation with historian and author Dr. Kersten Hall, of the Centre for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds, Tony shared his recollections of this memorable journey, recounting his role in pioneering the application of computing to solving biological structures (which has today led to powerful tools such as the Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold), as well as the distinguished people he met along the way, several of whom – such as Max Perutz and Dorothy Hodgkin – won Nobel Prizes for their work in this field.
Kersten studied biochemistry at the University of Oxford. He came to Leeds in 1993 to do a PhD in molecular biology and then worked as a post-doctoral research fellow in molecular biology in the School of Medicine. In 2005 he studied for a Masters degree in History and Philosophy of Science. He has been a member of the LPLS since 2007 and is currently on the Society’s Council. He is now a Visiting Fellow in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, and is the author of Insulin – the Crooked Timber: a History from Thick Brown Muck to Wall Street Gold (Oxford University Press, 2022) and The Man in the Monkeynut Coat: William Astbury and How Wool Wove a Forgotten Road to the Double-Helix (Oxford University Press, 2014/2022).
After the conversation, many in the audience joined Tony and Kersten for dinner – also in University House.
