John Masson Gulland

His work at University College Nottingham on electrometric titration was important in leading to the discovery of the DNA double helix by James Watson and Francis Crick, and he was described as "a great nucleic acid chemist.

His proposers were Sir James Walker, George Barger, Alexander Lauder, and Ralph Allan Sampson.

[3] In 1931 he moved to the University of London as a Reader in Biochemistry, also acting then as Senior Biochemist to the Lister Institute.

[6] He is buried in the Grange Cemetery in south Edinburgh with his parents and uncle, John William Gulland.

The Nottingham team, which included his colleagues Denis Jordan, Cedric Threlfall, and Michael Creeth, produced three papers in 1947: one led to high quality non-degraded DNA samples extracted without using acids or alkalis,[7] the next measured the viscosity of DNA [8] and the third proved the all-important hydrogen bond structures within it.

Once Watson had recognised the key role of the hydrogen bonds then the decoding of DNA seems to have come within about a week or ten days.

[14] There has been some speculative debate as to whether, if these events had turned out differently, the Nottingham team might have gone on to make the DNA decoding discovery themselves.