William Cochran

Who was William Cochran?

William Cochran was a prominent Scottish physicist.

Bill Cochran was born in Scotland and educated at Boroughmuir High School in Edinburgh. He studied physics at the University of Edinburgh. He completed his PhD under Arnold Beevers in the Chemistry Department in X-ray crystallography of sucrose using isomorphous replacement. Moving to Cambridge University to work with Lawrence Bragg, obtaining tenure in 1951. He realised that isomorphous replacement was the key to solving protein structures. With Francis Crick, he invented methods for deducing helical patterns from crystallographic data, which ultimately led to the solution of the structure of DNA.

Cochran went on to study neutron diffraction with Bertram Brockhouse and used lattice dynamics and to explain the phenomenon of ferroelectricity in terms of lattice instabilities. This was tested by his students Stuart Pawley, Roger Cowley and Richard Nelmes. This idea was also advanced around the same time by Philip Anderson, but Cochran, with his unfailing modesty, credits Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman and Negundagi with the original idea.