Raymond Gosling on The Biology of DNA” Meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
  Raymond Gosling     Biography    
Recorded: 03 Mar 2003

But I am very impressed—my wife and I have enjoyed our stay here. Of course, American hospitality is always rather overwhelming. But what I find so impressive and I hadn’t quite realized just how much Jim has used his nervous energy to build up this place. And I have to say that more power to his elbow. I think his footprint will be that much deeper in the sand because of what he’s been able to do here. Very impressive.

The meeting, of course, was wonderful. You had nearly a plurality of Nobel Prize winners and of course being a scientific meeting everybody was dressed down and Mary [Gosling] thought she could pick out the Nobel Prize winners because they were the most dressed down. I’m not sure that that’s true, but certainly it’s been a tremendous meeting. And of course for us, I’ve been thinking about—for the last forty years I’ve been thinking about the elasticity of our arterial system and how you could perhaps, by measuring that, predict those at greater risk for stroke and heart attack. And I hadn’t realized this enormous industry/academic endeavor, that the double helix has spawned. And coming to this meeting has laid all that open for us. So I’m very grateful to you all here and to Jim for inviting us to take part.

Raymond Gosling arrived at King’s lab in 1949 to work as a research student. Under the direction of Rosalind Franklin, he helped to perfect the technique of x-ray diffraction photography to obtain the A and B form images of DNA. Gosling met Watson when he arrived in Wilkins’s lab to review DNA diffraction images.

After completing his Ph.D., Gosling left King’s to teach physics at Queens’ College in Cambridge, at the University of St. Andrews, and at the University of the West Indies. He returned to the UK in 1967 to become professor and eventually emeritus professor in Physics Applied to Medicine at the Guy’s Hospital Medical School.

Raymond Gosling has dedicated much of his time researching the elasticity of the arterial system in order to develop tests to monitor one’s risk of stroke and heart attack.