Hanson's Legacy

Hanson's work was groundbreaking and was very much a collaborative effort with colleagues including Hugh Huxley and Jack Lowy.

Her methods of research were painstaking and thorough: a fine draughtswoman, as evidenced by the quality of her anatomical drawings, her laboratory studies were both meticulous and precise. Hanson also demonstrated great stamina in her laboratory work, spending hours repeating experiments and combining data from different sources and integrating them into a coherent model. She possessed excellent analytical skills that were particularly useful in envisaging three-dimensional structures from basic observational data - the marriage of observational rigour and scientific intuition that is the mark of the finest research minds.

Both the landmark sliding filament discovery and her work on the structure of actin have formed the basis of later discoveries into the functioning of proteins, while her teaching and administrative legacy is reflected in the enduring importance of biophysics and the biomolecular sciences at King's College.