Early Career

Hanson at Bedford College

Jean Hanson was born at Newhall, Derbyshire, in November 1919 and was educated at Burton on Trent, where she was inspired to study zoology and botany and also acquired what became a life long love of music and literature. Hanson entered Bedford College London in 1938 where she studied under the eminent zoologist, Professor Harold Munro Fox.

Whilst teaching at Birmingham University in the 1920s and 30s, Fox, along with his contemporaries, John Randall and Michael Abercrombie, began to recognise the potential value of cross-disciplinary collaboration between physicists and biologists in what would later become the new science of biophysics, of which the most famous discovery has been that of the structure of DNA, and an appreciation of which was to profoundly influence Hanson's experimental methodology in her professional career at King's