The Cavendish Laboratory is the Department of
Physics at the
University of Cambridge, and is part of the School of Physical Sciences. The laboratory was opened in 1874 on the
New Museums Site as a laboratory for experimental physics and is named after the British chemist and physicist
Henry Cavendish. The laboratory has had a huge influence on research in the disciplines of physics and biology.
The laboratory moved to its present site in
West Cambridge in 1974.
As of 2019[update], 30 Cavendish researchers have won
Nobel Prizes.[2] Notable discoveries to have occurred at the Cavendish Laboratory include the discovery of the
electron,
neutron, and structure of
DNA.
Professor
James Clerk Maxwell, the developer of
electromagnetic theory, was a founder of the laboratory and the first
Cavendish Professor of Physics.[7] The Duke of Devonshire had given to Maxwell, as head of the laboratory, the manuscripts of Henry Cavendish's unpublished Electrical Works. The editing and publishing of these was Maxwell's main scientific work while he was at the laboratory. Cavendish's work aroused Maxwell's intense admiration and he decided to call the Laboratory (formerly known as the Devonshire Laboratory) the Cavendish Laboratory and thus to commemorate both the Duke and Henry Cavendish.[8][9]
Ernest Rutherford became Director of the Cavendish Laboratory in 1919. Under his leadership the
neutron was discovered by
James Chadwick in 1932, and in the same year the first experiment to split the nucleus in a fully controlled manner was performed by students working under his direction;
John Cockcroft and
Ernest Walton.
Physical chemistry
Physical Chemistry (originally the department of Colloid Science led by
Eric Rideal) had left the old Cavendish site, subsequently locating as the Department of Physical Chemistry (under RG Norrish) in the then new chemistry building with the Department of Chemistry (led by Lord Todd) in
Lensfield Road: both chemistry departments merged in the 1980s.
The Cavendish Laboratory has had an important influence on
biology, mainly through the application of
X-ray crystallography to the study of structures of biological molecules.
Francis Crick already worked in the Medical Research Council Unit, headed by
Max Perutz[10][11] and housed in the Cavendish Laboratory, when
James Watson came from the United States and they made a breakthrough in discovering the structure of
DNA. For their work while in the Cavendish Laboratory, they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962, together with
Maurice Wilkins of King's College London, himself a graduate of St. John's College, Cambridge.
The discovery was made on 28 February 1953; the first Watson/Crick paper appeared in Nature on 25 April 1953. Sir
Lawrence Bragg, the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, where Watson and Crick worked, gave a talk at
Guy's Hospital Medical School in London on Thursday 14 May 1953 which resulted in an article by Ritchie Calder in the News Chronicle of London, on Friday 15 May 1953, entitled "Why You Are You. Nearer Secret of Life." The news reached readers of The New York Times the next day; Victor K. McElheny, in researching his biography, Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution, found a clipping of a six-paragraph New York Times article written from London and dated 16 May 1953 with the headline "Form of `Life Unit' in Cell Is Scanned." The article ran in an early edition and was then pulled to make space for news deemed more important. (The New York Times subsequently ran a longer article on 12 June 1953). The Cambridge University undergraduate newspaper Varsity also ran its own short article on the discovery on Saturday 30 May 1953. Bragg's original announcement of the discovery at a
Solvay Conference on
proteins in Belgium on 8 April 1953 went unreported by the British press.
Sydney Brenner,
Jack Dunitz,
Dorothy Hodgkin,
Leslie Orgel, and Beryl M. Oughton, were some of the first people in April 1953 to see the model of the structure of
DNA, constructed by Crick and Watson; at the time they were working at the
University of Oxford's Chemistry Department. All were impressed by the new DNA model, especially Brenner who subsequently worked with Crick at
Cambridge in the Cavendish Laboratory and the new
Laboratory of Molecular Biology. According to the late Dr. Beryl Oughton, later Rimmer, they all travelled together in two cars once Dorothy Hodgkin announced to them that they were off to Cambridge to see the model of the structure of DNA.[12] Orgel also later worked with Crick at the
Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
Present site
Due to overcrowding in the old buildings, it moved to its present site in
West Cambridge in the early 1970s.[13] It is due to move again to a third site currently under construction in West Cambridge.[14]
^Amos, L.; Finch, J. T. (2004). "Aaron Klug and the revolution in biomolecular structure determination". Trends in Cell Biology. 14 (3): 148–152.
doi:
10.1016/j.tcb.2004.01.002.
PMID15003624.
Longair, Malcolm (2016). Maxwell's Enduring Legacy: A Scientific History of the Cavendish Laboratory. Cambridge University Press.
ISBN978-1-107-08369-1.