David Harding (financier) individuals and organisations. Harding is also the patron of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, which opened in 2009. Harding's foundation, the David and Claudia Harding Foundation, has pledged £20 million to the Cavendish Laboratory, the University of Cambridge's Department of Physics, to establish The Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability, a research programme to apply theoretical physics to issues of the sustainability of natural resources. The donation to the Cavendish is the largest since it was created in 1874. He is one of the managers of the Winton
Cavendish Laboratory new chemistry building with the Department of Chemistry (led by Lord Todd) in Lensfield Road: both chemistry departments merged in the 1980s. In World War II the laboratory carried out research for the MAUD Committee, part of the British Tube Alloys project of research into the atomic bomb. Researchers included Nicholas Kemmer, Alan Nunn May, Anthony French, Samuel Curran and the French scientists including Lew Kowarski and Hans von Halban. Several transferred to Canada in 1943; the Montreal Laboratory and some later to the Chalk River Laboratories. The production of plutonium and neptunium by bombarding uranium-238 with neutrons was predicted