Robert Donald Bruce Fraser 1924–2019

Abstract

Robert Donald Bruce (Bruce) Fraser was a biophysicist who gained world-wide distinction for his extensive structural studies of fibrous proteins. Bruce began a part-time BSc degree at Birkbeck College, London, while working as a laboratory assistant. In 1942, aged 18, he interrupted his studies and volunteered for training as a pilot in the Royal Air Force (RAF). He was sent to the Union of South Africa and was selected for instructor training, specialising in teaching pilot navigation. At the end of the war he completed his BSc at King’s College, London, and followed this with a PhD. Bruce studied the structure of biological molecules, including DNA, using infra-red micro-spectroscopy in the Biophysics Unit at King’s led by physicist J. T. Randall FRS. During that time Bruce built a structure for DNA that was close to the Watson-Crick structure that gained them and Maurice Wilkins at Kings College, the Nobel Prize in 1962. In 1952, he immigrated to Australia with his family to a position in the newly formed Wool Textile Research Laboratories at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). Here, Bruce established a biophysics group for research on the structure of wool and other fibrous proteins that flourished until his retirement. Over that period he was internationally recognized as the pre-eminent fibrous protein structuralist world-wide. Having been acting chief, Bruce was subsequently appointed chief of the Division of Protein Chemistry and he remained in that role until he took retirement in 1987.