Cavendish Professor of Physics However, it was poorly advertised, so it was only to his students that he laid out his plans for physics at Cambridge. When Maxwell began the actual course a few days later with a lecture on heat, it was attended by academics in formal dress, in the belief that it was the first lecture. Maxwell spent the next three years supervising the construction of the dedicated Cavendish Laboratory, and published in 1873 A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. Maxwell's health deteriorated a short time into his tenure, and he died in 1879, aged 48. Lord Rayleigh replaced Maxwell immediately upon
Cavendish Laboratory in 1940 by two teams working independently: Egon Bretscher and Norman Feather at the Cavendish and Edwin M. McMillan and Philip Abelson at Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. 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 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