Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge The Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge is the chemistry department of the University of Cambridge. It was formed from a merger in the early 1980s of two separate departments that had moved into the Lensfield Road building decades earlier: the Department of Physical Chemistry (originally led by Professor Ronald Norrish FRS, Nobel Laureate; the department was previously located near the Old Cavendish in Free School Lane - see photo) and the Department of Chemistry (that included theoretical chemistry and which was led by Lord Alexander R. Todd FRS, Nobel Laureate) respectively.
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