Darwin’s great-granddaughter who also found scientific success
CECILY LITTLETON, who has died aged 95, was a member of the Darwin family, one of the world’s most eminent scientific dynasties, and made her own name as an expert in X-ray crystallography and later astronomy.
An only daughter and the first of five children, Cecily Darwin was born on November 15 1926 in Edinburgh where her father, Charles (later Sir Charles) Galton Darwin was Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy.
An authority on atomic theory and X-ray diffraction, Charles Galton Darwin was the son of George Howard Darwin, Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge, and he was the grandson of Charles Darwin, the author of On the Origin of Species.
In 1936 the family moved to Cambridge where Charles Galton had been appointed Master of Christ’s College. He would go on to serve as director of the National Physical Laboratory during the war, coordinating American, British and Canadian efforts on the Manhattan Project.
Cecily’s mother Katharine was a mathematician and daughter of Francis Pember, Warden of All Soul’s College Oxford from 1914 to 1932, and Vice-chancellor of Oxford University from 1926 to 1929.
Other notable family members included the artist Gwen Raverat, Cecily’s paternal aunt, while another, Margaret, married Geoffrey Keynes, an eminent surgeon and brother of the economist John Maynard Keynes.
Of Cecily’s brothers, George would work developing computers and marry Angela Huxley, a granddaughter of the writer Leonard Huxley and great-granddaughter of “Darwin’s Bulldog” Thomas Huxley; Henry joined the Foreign Office where he helped draft the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; Francis taught Zoology at the University of London and Edward became a civil engineer.
Cecily went up to Somerville College, Oxford and studied X-ray crystallography with Dorothy Hodgkin, who would win the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1964. In 1950 the two women published a joint article in the journal Nature describing a new approach to examining the structure of biomolecules.
After graduation Cecily Darwin moved to the US as a research fellow with the X-ray crystallographer Arthur Lindo Patterson at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in Philadelphia. There she met John Littleton, a lawyer and keen amateur musician, at a New Year’s Eve party. They married in 1951.
In the 1950s Cecily Littleton was one of a team of scientists at the ICR who pioneered new statistical methods in X-ray analysis and the modelling of crystals. In the 1960s, however, she changed her field of interest and joined the astronomer Louis Green at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where she studied stellar evolution, the internal structure of stars, and other cosmic phenomena.
Charming, adventurous, well-read and drily funny, Cecily Littleton once sailed through the Beagle Channel on her way to the Galapagos Islands and toured China in the 1990s.
In the 1980s she studied horticulture at the Barnes Foundation, an art collection and educational institution in Philadelphia which promotes the appreciation of art and horticulture, and went on to help design several landscapes in the Philadelphia area.
She was active in many organisations, including the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University (formerly the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia), the oldest natural science research institution and museum in the Americas, to which, in 1989, she donated a “ladies’ side chair” from Down House, Charles Darwin’s home in Kent.
Cecily Littleton’s husband died in 2009 and she is survived by their two daughters and two sons.