Letters: March 2022

Lindsey’s crystal

In the January issue, Katrina Krämer wrote about June Lindsey, who had carried out crystallographic research in the Cavendish Laboratory under Lawrence Bragg and Will Taylor during the late 1940s. One of the important crystal structures derived by Lindsey was that of adenine hydrochloride, a molecule whose structure was a necessary step towards the solution of the structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson. She published her work in 1948, under her maiden name of Broomhead (DOI: 10.1107/S0365110X48000855).

I joined the crystallography laboratory at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, UK, in 1969 to work with Helen Megaw. By then, Bragg had left many years earlier to go to the Royal Institution and Taylor and Megaw were soon to retire. As a result I ended up in charge of the crystallography laboratory. In 1976, I moved to Oxford, taking most of the equipment and records of the laboratory with me. This included many crystal structure models, and I was delighted to see that I still had June’s adenine hydrochloride model. I attach a photograph; the model can be viewed in the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford.

Mike Glazer
Oxford, UK