King's College London Medical Research Council Biophysics Research Unit

Centre

King's College London Medical Research Council Biophysics Research Unit

• King's College London MRC Biophysics Research Unit

1946-1984

The Biophysics Research Unit was founded in 1946 funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and attached to the Department of Physics, with John Turton Randall as first Director. It moved into the purpose-built Wheatstone Physics Laboratory in the basement of the main King’s Building, 1952. Staff of the Unit published preliminary findings on the structure of DNA in the April 1953 edition of Nature, simultaneously with James Watson and Francis Crick, Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. After years of further research, Maurice Wilkins was jointly awarded, with Watson and Crick, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1962. The Unit became part of a newly formed Department of Biophysics in 1962 and became the MRC Cell Biophysics Unit from 1974.

Wilkins, Maurice Hugh Frederick, 1916-2004, molecular biologist (1916-2004)

King's College London Department of Biophysics (1962-1989)

King's College London Department of Physics (1893-1921)