An Interactive Annotated World Bibliography of Printed and Digital Works in the History of Medicine and the Life Sciences from Circa 2000 BCE to 2024 by Fielding H. Garrison (1870-1935), Leslie T. Morton (1907-2004), and Jeremy M. Norman (1945- ) Traditionally Known as “Garrison-Morton”

16061 entries, 14144 authors and 1947 subjects. Updated: December 10, 2024

Permanent Link for Entry #14876

  • 12635

X-ray crystallographic investigation of the structure of penicillin. IN: Clarke, Johnson, Robinson (eds.) Chemistry of penicillin (1949) 310-67.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949.

Hodgkin and colleagues, including biochemist Barbara Low, solved the structure of penicillin in 1945, demonstrating, contrary to scientific opinion at the time, that it contains a β-lactam ring. The discovery was originally published by Crowfoot (Hodgkin) and Rogers-Low in 1945 in a classified report (Committee for Protein Synthesis [CPS] report #508). The work was first made public in 1949.

In 1949 Hodgkin and Low published another version of their report in Florey, Chain et al, Antibiotics: A survey, vol. 2, ch. 27, "Structure of the penicillin molecule," pp. 946-951.

Hodgkin used an IBM ‘CPS’ (Card Programmed, electronic Calculator), to perform the extremely complex math/generation/interpretation of the Fourier
synthesis yielding the 3D structure. This use of a programmed electronic punched-card tabulator was a very early use of a programmed device to speed up structure factor computation in x-ray crystallography.

With Charles W. Bunn and Annette Turner-Jones.

(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)



Subjects: BIOLOGY › MOLECULAR BIOLOGY › Protein Structure, COMPUTING/MATHEMATICS in Medicine & Biology › Computing / Mathematics in Medicine & Biology, PHARMACOLOGY › PHARMACEUTICALS › Antibiotics › Penicillin
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