BCA Office Past Meetings Lonsdale Lecture BCA Council BSG CCG BCA Site Map BCA Membership Bragg Lecture Hodgkin Lecture Prize Lectures IG PCG Contacts

Following a meeting of the National Committee of Crystallography in November 1957, Gordon Cox discussed the idea of a memorial Bragg lecture with fellow committee members Kathleen Lonsdale and W.H.Taylor. Since 1962 was the centenary of the birth of W.H.Bragg and the jubilee of the discovery of X-ray diffraction by crystals it seemed a good year to begin the lectures. Kathleen Lonsdale donated her prize money from the award of the Davy Medal from the Royal Society, others followed and a small fund was created to provide an honorarium and travelling expenses for a lecture to be held every two or three years. The original idea was to hold the lectures for about 20 years, but Helen Megaw argued strongly that she saw no reason to limit the time. In 1960 the Royal Institution agreed to administer the fund in trust for the endowment of the Bragg lectures. The first public announcement of the lectures was made by Kathleen Lonsdale on 17th August 1960 following Lawrence Bragg's Congress Discourse on "The Growth in the Power of X-ray Analyses" at the IUCr in Cambridge.

For further information on any aspect of the Bragg Lectures and their administration please contact the current Secretary of the Bragg Lecture Fund.

List of Bragg Lectures

1. 1962 P. P. Ewald - Leeds and The Royal Institution, London
2. 1965 Kathleen Lonsdale - Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth, Australia
3. 1968 Dorothy Hodgkin - Manchester
4. 1970 B. E. Warren - The Royal Institution, London
5. 1973 R. W. G. Wyckoff - Cambridge
6. 1981 H. Lipson - Leeds and The Royal Institution, London
               W. L. Bragg - Scientific Revolutionary
7. 1982 M. M. Woolfson - Manchester, Cambridge
               Structural Crystallography in the 80s
8. 1985 Sir David Phillips - Leeds and The Royal Institution, London
               The Silver Jubilee of Successful Protein Crystallography
9. 1987 B. W. Matthews - Perth and Adelaide, Australia
10. 1993 Sir Gordon Cox - Manchester, and The Royal Institution, London
                Bliss was it in that Dawn to be Alive
    1993 Max Perutz - Manchester, and The Royal Institution, London
                How Lawrence Bragg proved me Wrong
11. 1994 A. M. Glazer - Newcastle-upon-Tyne
                Crystals Make Light Work
12. 1996 K. C. Holmes - Cambridge
                Structural Biology of Macromolecules and the Development of X-Ray Diffraction
13. 1997 D. W. J. Cruickshank - Leeds and The Royal Institution, London
                Gordon Cox and the Increasing Power of X-Ray Structure Analysis
14. 1999 J. D. Dunitz - Glasgow and Cambridge
                Polymorphism: the Same but Different

John Robertson wrote an article about the Braggs in Leeds for Crystallography News in March 1997. The UK Post Office issued a commemmorative postage stamp in 1997.