John Jenkin was born, raised, and educated in Adelaide, South Australia, with first class honours in physics from the University of Adelaide in 1960, and a Ph.D. in low-energy nuclear physics from the Australian National University in Canberra. He went on to become Head of the Department of Physics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and in the latter part of his career joined the History and Philosophy of Science program in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (1993-2000).

From very early in his career John also had an undeveloped interest in the history of his discipline, physics, and during research into the history of his own work the names William Bragg and Adelaide University emerged. Publishing widely in all areas of his career, John’s research into the history of science, and the Braggs in particular, culminated in the publication of his major work, John Jenkin, William and Lawrence Bragg, father and son: the most extraordinary collaboration in science (Oxford, UK: OUP, 2008).

William Henry Bragg was a British physicist and mathematician who uniquely shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with his elder son, Lawrence Bragg, "for their services in the analysis of crystal structures by means of X-rays", and who later pioneered public understanding and sympathy for science at both the Royal Institution and as President of the Royal Society of London.

William Lawrence Bragg, widely known as Lawrence Bragg, was an Australian-British physicist who first enunciated Bragg's Law, pioneered the use of X-rays to determine crystal structures, shared with his father the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics (remaining the youngest-ever laureate), and who, as Director of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, promoted research to discover the structure of proteins (notably DNA).