Professor William T. Astbury – Physicist,1898-1961
One lunch-time in the spring of 1953, future Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, burst
into ‘The Eagle’ pub in Cambridge proclaiming to anyone within earshot that he had found
the secret of life. What Crick and his colleague James Watson had actually found was the
structure of the DNA molecule which could explain how genes are inherited from one
generation to the next. Instrumental to their discovery however, was technology pioneered at
Leeds University by the physicist William T. Astbury.
Astbury was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1898, the son of a potter’s turner. He won a
scholarship to Cambridge University in 1917, but with the First World War raging in Europe,
his undergraduate studies were interrupted by service in the Royal Army Medical Corps
during which time he met his future wife, Francis Gould. After graduating in physics, he
trained at the Royal Institution with his mentor Sir William Bragg (also formerly of Leeds
University) who had pioneered the method of determining the shape of molecules by
analysing the patterns made by X-rays reflected from their crystals.
This expertise in the use of X-rays brought Astbury to Leeds in 1928 where he lived
on Kirkstall Lane, Headingley. Through his initial work using X-rays to analyse the structure
of wool fibres for the local textile industries he became fascinated by the long chain
molecules found within living cells. Despite working in Spartan conditions and having at
least initially to build most of his own equipment, he soon established such a prominent
global reputation that the Nobel Prize winning scientist Max Perutz referred to Leeds as ‘the
X-ray Vatican’. Convinced that the key to understanding living systems was to analyse their
molecular structure, he used his X-ray methods to show that the physical properties of natural
materials such as human hair, hedgehog spines, porcupine quills, spider’s webs and seagull
feathers were caused by long molecules changing shape. With his emphasis on understanding
life through studying the shapes of molecules, he played a major part in founding the new
science of what he termed ‘molecular biology’. It was this new approach to biology which
ultimately gave rise to modern methods such as DNA fingerprinting, screening for genetic
diseases and the biotechnology industry.
Despite being a member of numerous prestigious bodies such as the Royal Society,
and the New York Academy of Sciences, Astbury never lost the common touch and was
always eager to communicate science to a wider audience by giving public lectures. Keen to
stress the practical applications of his work, he was a consultant for a number of commercial
companies and famously sported a coat spun from protein fibres extracted from peanuts, an
innovation which he hoped might revitalise the British textile industry.
Although he applied his work on molecular shapes to studies of blood clotting,
rheumatism, ophthalmology and cancer perhaps one of his greatest scientific contributions
was to take the first X-ray photographs of DNA, the molecule of heredity. Yet why he never
used the clues from these photographs to solve the structure of the molecule as Crick and
Watson later did, remains a puzzle. In the aftermath of World War II, he sought government
funding to establish Leeds as the national centre for his new science of molecular biology
only to meet with rejection. Suggestions have been made that this was such a blow to his
spirits that he simply gave up the pursuit of DNA. Yet this seems to conflict with the image
of a man for whom science was always an adventure and who was able to infect his coworkers with a similar excitement and enthusiasm, a talent perhaps best expressed by his
fellow scientist R.D.Preston who once wrote - ‘To be with Astbury is like a perpetual
Christmas morning’.
Kersten T. Hall
School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science