Obituary of Louise Johnson (1940-2012)

Louise Johnson, born in Worcester, UK, earned a degree in physics at University College London before earning a PhD in biophysics from London’s Royal Institution in 1962. She used x-ray crystallography to determine the protein structure of the enzyme lysozyme in 1965. She continued her work with x-ray crystallography of protein structures throughout her career, also discovering the structure of ribonuclease S and glycogen phosphorylase. In 1967, she joined the faculty at the University of Oxford, and remained there until she retired. Her work was significant in the development of our understanding of protein structures and the mechanics by which enzymes function. In 1976 she published Protein Crystallography with Tom Blundell, which was widely used as a textbook on the topic. Johnson was made a fellow of the British Royal Society in 1990 and a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Science in 2011. She was married to physicist and Nobel laureate Abdus Salam.