Part 2: The history of structural biology
Michael Glazer is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Oxford and Vice President of the International Union of Crystallography. His field of research is in crystallography, with a particular focus on the relationship between crystal structures and physical properties. Georgina Ferry is a science writer and wrote the first biography of Dorothy Hodgkin.
Understanding the function of a protein is an important step toward finding out why the body succumbs to disease - but how do scientists find proteins and figure out how they work?
By determining the 3D structure of a protein, structural biologists can learn more about how proteins work and how our cells interact.
2014 marks the centenary of the discovery of X-ray crystallography, which is one of the most successful and widely used techniques for finding the 3D structure of a protein.
But what was Oxford's role in the development of this technique? Find out more in our Part 3: Advanced technology