Laboratory of Molecular Biology after their formal retirement including: Max Perutz, following an undergraduate training in organic chemistry, left Austria in 1936 and came to the University of Cambridge to study for a PhD, joining the X-ray crystallographic group led by J.D. Bernal. Here, in the Cavendish laboratory, he started his lifelong work on hemoglobin. The death of Lord Rutherford led to his successor, Lawrence Bragg, a pioneer in X-ray crystallography, becoming the new Cavendish professor of physics in 1938. Bragg became a major supporter of Perutz and his group in those early days. After World War II, many scientists from the physical side
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