Raymond Gosling

Raymond George Gosling (15 July 1926 – 18 May 2015) was a British scientist. While a PhD student at

He was born in 1926 and attended school in Wembley. He studied physics at University College London from 1944 to 1947 and became a hospital physicist at the King's Fund and Middlesex Hospital between 1947 and 1949 before joining King's College London as a research student, from which he eventually received his PhD.^[2]

Career

Work at King's College London and DNA

When he arrived at King's College London, Gosling was directed by Sir John Randall^[3] to work on the problem of the structure of DNA.^[4] Randall was convinced that DNA was the material which transmitted the genetic code.^[5] Randall assigned him to work on X-ray diffraction with Maurice Wilkins,^[6] analysing samples of DNA which they prepared by hydrating and drawing out into thin filaments and photographing in a hydrogen atmosphere.^[1] He made the first x-ray diffraction image of crystallized DNA. His comment on this discovery was "I must be the first person ever to make genes crystallize",^[5] although he was probably unaware of the prior work of Florence Bell.

After the initial work producing the first x-ray diffraction of DNA, Randall reassigned Gosling to work with Rosalind Franklin, who had been just hired to join King's College in 1951. He did this without consulting with Wilkins, a factor which may have contributed to the animosity between the two.^[7]

During the next two years, the pair worked closely together to perfect the technique of X-ray diffraction photography of DNA and obtained at the time the sharpest diffraction images of

When Franklin left King's College, Gosling was reassigned back to work with Wilkins, with whom he formally completed his thesis work. After the first Nature article on the x-ray diffraction results leading to the double helix model, he and Franklin (who had by that time left King's College) followed up their DNA x-ray analysis with a second article in Nature.[10]

His other King's colleagues included

Gosling briefly remained at King's College following the completion of his thesis in 1954, but the 1953 work on DNA structure was not, at the time, viewed with the importance it now has achieved, and following his Ph.D., Gosling found no opportunity to continue at King's, although he would have liked to do so.[5]

Gosling went on to lecture in physics at Queen's College, University of St Andrews in Scotland, and then found a long-term position at the University of the West Indies.^[2] For a few years he continued with crystallography research, focusing on analysis of the structure of nucleotides, but then shifted toward research in the field of medical physics, working on designing equipment to study and diagnose atherosclerosis.^[5]

Work at Guy's Hospital

He returned to the UK in 1967 and became Lecturer and Reader at

Gosling served on numerous committees of the University of London, notably relating to radiological science, and retained an active professional involvement in medical physics almost to the end of his life.

Personal background

Gosling and his wife Mary had four sons, the eldest of whom is the furniture designer Tim Gosling. Raymond Gosling died at the age of 88 on 18 May 2015.^[1][15]

References