Molecular Biology and the Crucial Role Played by the Davy–Faraday Research Laboratory in its Birth

It was at the Davy Faraday Research Laboratory in the late 1920s, early 1930s, that a group of Sir William Bragg’s research students (notably J. D. Bernal and W. T. Astbury) started to study, by X-ray methods, all nature of living molecules, such as skin, amino acids, steroids, finger nails, proteins, tendons and viruses. These studies continued when Bernal returned to Cambridge and Astbury started a molecular biophysics group in the University of Leeds. Dorothy Hodgkin (from Oxford) and Max Perutz (from Vienna) both joined Bernal at Cambridge, and they made enormous progress in determining the structures of ‘living’ molecules. Hodgkin elucidated the structure of cholesterol and many other steroids. And Perutz started his monumental work on haemoglobin at Cambridge, and he also studied it at the DFRL.