Barbara Low, penicillin and the protein pi helix
Mike Sutton celebrates the remarkable career of a female crystallographer, once mistaken for the tea-lady
Barbara Wharton Low was born in 1920 in Lancaster, where her parents kept a grocery shop. In 1939 she began studying chemistry at Somerville, the most scientifically active among Oxford’s few women’s colleges. Dorothy Hodgkin recruited her as an assistant on the penicillin project. She became an assistant professor at Harvard in 1950. Low’s x-ray investigations a year later revealed a form of protein folding – the pi-helix. She moved from Harvard to New York’s Columbia University, becoming a full professor there in 1966. She introduced many young researchers to advanced x-ray crystallographic techniques, while continuing her work on the structures of biologically important molecules.