The Hydrogen Bond. A Bond for Life

It is not unusual in accounts of the discovery of the double helix to encounter highly critical comments on the behaviour of individuals involved and this book is no exception. However judgements are well supported by extensive references with the 387 pages of text being followed by 60 pages containing some 1500 notes identifying sources – a remarkable number for a book aimed at a general audience. In this context it is worth quoting from the author’s Last Words, ‘With such a rich and diverse cast, there are plenty of candidates who could round off the story in style. My own choice is a man who hovered on the periphery of the action, but who determined the course of this particular stretch of history: John Randall. Without him, the structure of the double helix would still have been solved – but Francis Crick, JimWatson, MauriceWilkins and Rosalind Franklin would probably have played no part in that discovery’. Randall continued to embrace challenges: in the early 1960s he secured generous support from the Medical Research Council and the Welcome Trust to establish a Department of Biophysics in a handsomely restored 5-storey building in Covent Garden and when he retired to Edinburgh University in 1970 he assembled a group undertaking novel studies of protein structure by neutron scattering at the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble.