The Scientific Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth

John R Helliwell, DSc (Physics, University of York), DPhil (Molecular Biophysics, Oxford University), is Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at The University of Manchester, where he served as Professor of Structural Chemistry from 1989 to 2012. Academic teaching from 1979 to 1988 was at the Universities of Keele and York in the physics departments there. He is a researcher in the fields of crystallography, biophysics, structural biology, structural chemistry, and data science. He was also based at the Synchrotron Radiation Source at the UK’s Daresbury Laboratory in various periods of appointment between 1979 to 2008, including in 2002 as Director of Synchrotron Radiation Science. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Royal Society of Biology, and the American Crystallographic Association, and an Honorary Member of the British Crystallographic Association and of the British Biophysical Society. He is a Corresponding Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Barcelona, Spain, and an Honorary Member of the National Institute of Chemistry, Slovenia. His awards include the European Crystallographic Association Eighth Max Perutz Prize 2015, the American Crystallographic Association Patterson Award 2014, and the “Professor K Banerjee Endowment Lecture Silver Medal” of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS) 2001. He has published over 200 scientific research papers and several books, e.g., Macromolecular Crystallography with Synchrotron Radiation with Cambridge University Press (1992), published in paperback in 2005, and Macromolecular Crystallization and Crystal Perfection with N E Chayen and E H Snell), Oxford University Press, International Union of Crystallography Monographs on Crystallography (2010). He has published several Scientific Life, popular science, books in recent years, which are with CRC Press, Taylor & Francis. He has served in roles of major responsibility such as President of the European Crystallographic Association (2007–2010), Chairman of the International Union of Crystallography’s (IUCr) Commission on Journals (1996–2005), and Chairman of the IUCr Diffraction Data Deposition Working Group (2011–2017) and its Committee on Data (2017–2023) as well as its Representative to the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI; 2005–2014) and the International Council of Science’s Committee on Data “CODATA” (2012–2023). In the past thirty years, he has chaired several international advisory committees for synchrotron, and more recently, neutron, facilities’ development and their users’ science. He was Leader of the UK Delegation at the International Union of Pure and Applied Biophysics Congress and General Assembly in New Delhi, India, in 1999, and was Leader of the UK Delegation at the International Union of Crystallography Congress and General Assembly in Prague in 2021. Scientists, in their career development, seek guidance. He has been a senior mentor at the University of Manchester, both in the Department of Chemistry and in its Manchester Gold scheme, as well as a director in the scientific civil service, as mentioned above. He has had interests in the philosophy of science for a long time. So much so that he has written quite a number of book reviews on the topic in his (semi-)retirement since 2012. He has also reviewed books on how science is communicated and how it is managed for the public good, as well as books on scientific career development.

Other books by John R Helliwell in his Scientific Life Series
Skills for a Scientific Life
The Whys of a Scientific Life
The Whats of a Scientific Life
The Whens and Wheres of a Scientific Life