September 26, 1940

We used the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for this post about Louise Napier
Johnson (September 26, 1940 to September 25, 2012), a British "biophysicist and structural biologist."

....[At] Wimbledon High School for Girls .... she excelled at everything, .... Both the school and her family put a great value on girls' education, and her mother had herself taken a degree at University College, London. Later Johnson recounted that reading Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy at the age of seventeen was the moment at which she started to think for herself. Out of school, she loved horse riding and went to the Horse of the Year show with her pony, Highlight.

[For graduate work]...she went to the Royal Institution, London, ...... There she carried out her doctoral research under the supervision of David Phillips. His team was working on the three-dimensional structure of the enzyme lysozyme, which was determined by X-ray crystallographic techniques in 1965. She was awarded her PhD in 1965 from the University of London for a thesis entitled ‘The structure of N-acetyl-glucosamine and its relation to lysozyme’. She and Phillips published the work in Nature in 1965, ..... Working with Phillips, she deduced for the first time the mechanism of action of an enzyme, the anti-bacterial properties of which were originally described in the 1920s by Alexander Fleming. Johnson showed how lysozyme bound substrates and cleaved particular polysaccharide cell wall components. These findings were the first of several seminal contributions made by her to the newly fledged field of structural enzymology, whereby the detailed structures and mechanisms governing the action and regulation of biological molecules could be elucidated. For the rest of her working life, she was fascinated by both the biology and the physics of biological systems at the molecular and atomic level: a true biophysicist.

In 1966 Johnson obtained a post as a post-doctoral research assistant at Yale University, .... She returned to the UK the following year to take up a position in the newly formed laboratory of molecular biophysics in the zoology department of Oxford University. This laboratory was led by Phillips, who had moved there from the Royal Institution with most of his group in 1966.

In Oxford, Johnson was first a departmental demonstrator (1967–73) with an affiliation to Somerville College, where she held the Janet Vaughan lectureship in biophysics. In 1973 she became a university lecturer and additional fellow of Somerville College, retaining the Janet Vaughan lectureship and gaining a readership in 1990.

On 11 November 1968 Johnson married the theoretical physicist and future Nobel laureate Muhammad Abdus Salam (1926–1996). Together they had a son, Umar (b. 1974), and a daughter, Sayyeda (b. 1982). Johnson was a devoted mother, who fitted her full and demanding working life around her family. Preaching what she practised, she also encouraged a family-friendly ethic and work practices in the different managerial roles she took on. Apart from her family, her main interest outside science was horses, and she was an accomplished rider. She and her daughter rode together almost daily around the Oxfordshire countryside. For a number of years she also had a beloved cat called Max who loved only her, and pined pitifully for her when she became ill.

At the laboratory of molecular biophysics, Johnson started working on determining the structure of the regulatory enzyme, glycogen phosphorylase (GP)... a challenging one that would occupy Johnson's research time for the next twenty years. In the early 1990s this work culminated in a detailed description of GP's structure and mode of action, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry in 1990 and elsewhere. As a result of this pioneering work, she was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1990....
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Upon Phillips's retirement in 1990 as head of the laboratory of molecular biophysics, which was by now affiliated to the biochemistry department in Oxford, Johnson was selected as his successor. At the same time she became the David Phillips professor of molecular biophysics, and a professorial fellow of Corpus Christi College (retaining her connection with Somerville as an honorary fellow). She held this professorship until her retirement in 2007. ....

Johnson authored or co-authored 186 peer-reviewed scientific papers during her long career. .....

Johnson worked tirelessly in supporting and encouraging scientists to establish effective research laboratories in developing regions as far apart as South America, the Middle East, and South Asia. She was delighted when she was elected an associate member of the Third World Academy of Sciences in 2000, and she chaired its selection panel for elections in the fields of cell, structural, and molecular biology. She also made numerous trips to lecture or advise scientists in developing countries, including Bangladesh, Iran, and Brazil. ....
Johnson received many honours and honorary degrees, notably being made a DBE in 2003 ....She was a foreign fellow of ....the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007). ....
Johnson moved to Cambridge in August 2011 to be nearer her son and his family, and suffered a major debilitating heart attack the same day...[After her death the next year she] was survived by her two children, both of whom worked in international aid and development.