Vernon Ingram is presently the John & Dorothy Wilson Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in 1949 from the University of London. In the late 1950s he was at the Medical Research Council Unit for the Study of the Molecular Structure of Biological Systems, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, England. During that time he published the landmark paper "Gene Mutations in Human Haemoglobin: the Chemical Difference Between Normal and Sickle Cell Haemoglobin" (Nature 180:326-328,1957). In that paper he wrote: "I have now found that out of nearly 300 amino acids in the two proteins, only one is different; one of the glutamic acid residues of normal haemoglobin is replaced by a valine residue in sickle cell anaemia haemoglobin." This was the first time that it had been demonstrated that a single gene mutation resulted in a change in a single amino acid in a polypeptide chain. Today Vernon Ingram's research is in a very different area of biology. He is interested in the molecular basis of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and Huntington's Disease, as well as Senile Dementia. We asked him about his remembrances of JD Bernal and he wrote: JD Bernal at Birkbeck College My contacts with Bernal were infrequent, but always interesting. By the time I knew him, 1949-1950, he was already much more interested in politics than in science. Nevertheless, his encyclopedic knowledge of physics and chemistry was legendary, hence his nickname "The Sage". Birkbeck College was preparing to move from its old fire damaged buildings in Breams Buildings off Fleet Street in the City of London to a new building next to the U of London headquarters in Bloomsbury. The college was renting several small Georgian terraced houses in Torrington Square, right next door. One of these housed the X-ray crystallography group under Harry Carlisle, working on Ribonuclease, and also Bernal's office and his personal flat (on the top floor). Organic Chemistry had a couple of floors next door, connecting internally. I could go from my lab. through a firewall to the corridor outside Bernal's office (guarded by a very protective secretary, whose name escapes me). I was working on properties of pepsin and some small but very insoluble peptide products produced by the autolysis of pepsin. These were tyrosine peptides which formed nice crystals. However, they were not sufficiently interesting to the X-ray crystallographers, including Bernal. I was really just marking time, having just gotten my Ph.D. in optical activity due to restricted rotation of some polycyclic compounds under Fred Barrow. I then worked for a year under HN Rydon, reader in organic chemistry at Birkbeck who was interested in enzymes and enzyme kinetics, hence pepsin hydrolysis. This was not too fascinating, but turned my attention to enzymes and proteins. These interested me also because I had a degree in Zoology which included some very good lectures on animal physiology. At this point, I went to Bernal, since I knew of his early work on crystals of proteins and asked for suggestions on what to do next. He suggested that I might go to study with Moses Kunitz at the Rockefeller, who with Northrop was one of the first to purify and crystallize proteins - trypsin and chymotrypsin, I believe. I think that it was in Bernal's mind that I might come back and help the protein X-ray crystallographers at Birkbeck. In the event, when I returned from the States in 1952 I went to the competition - Max Perutz in Cambridge, because they offered me a good job. Ah, well! In any case, I have always been grateful to Bernal for helping me to get a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to go to the US. That's all I remember; not much, I'm afraid. I did not know Bernal well enough to give any insight into the workings of his remarkable mind. To us young socialists at the time, all the people we admired were "progressive", though Bernal went much further to the left than most of us. return to historical highlights http://medicine.wustl.edu/~virology/highlights.htm