[7] Whilst a student at Cambridge, she was taught how to use x-ray crystallography to study biological molecules by John Desmond Bernal.

[11] In 1939 Bell gave a talk about textiles during an Institute of Physics conference at the University of Leeds, which was covered in the Yorkshire Evening Post in an article entitled "Women Scientist Explains".

[12] Bell came up with a method to stretch out the fibers to make dried films of purified DNA, with which she took x-ray diffraction photographs that were clearer than previous work.

[15] At the time, they were unaware that DNA can change conformation from A to B-form with humidity, and as a result their photographs are more blurry than the later Photo 51 x-ray image[8] taken by Gosling in 1952.

[7] The University of Leeds and William Astbury fought to get her back to the laboratory, keeping her position on hold and writing to the War Office.

She then moved with her husband to the United States where she was employed by the British Air Commission in Washington, D.C., and later she worked as an industrial chemist for the Magnolia Petroleum Company in Beaumont, Texas.

[18] It is also worth noting that this work was done at a time when most scientists believed that proteins were the genetic material and that DNA was just a structural component composed of a monotonous repeat of bases.

[3] A seminar room was named in Bell's honor in the recently opened Sir William Henry Bragg Building on the campus of University of Leeds in 2022.