Barbara Low, a pioneering scientist who used X-ray crystallography to reveal the shape of molecules including the antibiotic penicillin, died on January 10 at the age of 98, according to a tribute from Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
Low was an emeritus professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, where she taught for almost 60 years starting in 1956. She retired in 1990, but lectured at Columbia until 2013, according to an obituary in The New York Times.
Low was born in northwestern England in 1920 and earned her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Oxford’s Sommerville College in 1943, according to the Times. For her graduate studies at Oxford, she worked under the tutelage of Dorothy Hodgkin, a future Nobel laureate. Hodgkin trained Low in X-ray crystallography and during World War II the pair figured out penicillin’s molecular structure.
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