Crossing the Disciplinary Boundaries at the Cavendish Laboratory: DNA Double Helix

J. Watson and F. Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine 50 years ago for the discovery of the DNA double helix. That finding is well known to have been important to the development of molecular biology. However, it’s not widely appreciated that Crick and another co-recipient, M. Wilkins, were physicists and that the research was carried out at one of the leading physics laboratories, the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. How could that happen? It was the result of the development of X-ray crystallography and the research tradition of the Cavendish Laboratory. X-ray crystallography, the main experimental method used for the DNA double helix, was developed by two physicists, W. H. Bragg and W. L. Bragg, in the UK during the 1920-30s. Some of their students entered the Cavendish Laboratory to work. They tried some organic chemicals like vitamin B and hemoglobin under the directorship of E. Rutherford who headed a big research group in nuclear physics. X-ray crystallography began to grow fast at the Cavendish Laboratory when W. L. Bragg succeeded Rutherford in 1937. As early as in 1937, nuclear physics had become too big for the Cavendish Laboratory to support, and X-ray crystallography was promising productive research across many fields such as physics, chemistry, biology, metallurgy, and medicine.