Artificial Protein Fibres: Their Conception and Preparation

William Thomas Astbury, 1898-1961

With the death of William Thomas Astbury on 4 June 1961, there passed one of the most characteristic figures of what may be called the heroic age of crystal structure analysis—the first generation to follow the Braggs—but he was more than this. He was a founder of what is now one of the most exciting growing points of science, molecular biology . Known to all as Bill Astbury, he was one of the great characters of British science in the twentieth century. Although always associated with Leeds where he worked for thirty-three years, he was born on 25 February 1898, the fourth of seven children, at Longton in the Stoke district where his father, W. E. Astbury, was a potter’s turner. Bill Astbury retained to the end of his life the directness and simplicity of the Five Towns. But he early showed his intellectual gifts as well, encouraged by his mother and by a succession of schoolmasters who recognized his promise. He received all his education by scholarships, a difficult achievement in those days. He won a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge, in chemistry, physics and mathematics. He went up in 1917 but his stay in Cambridge was interrupted by the war; he served in the R.A.M.C. in Cork where he met his future wife. In 1919 he returned to Cambridge and completed his course, reading chemistry, physics and mineralogy in Part I and physics in Part II, achieving first classes in both.

Croonian Lecture - On the structure of biological fibres and the problem of muscle

The least original way of beginning the Croonian Lecture, yet quite the best with regard to our subject to-day, is to quote again the original terms of reference. The founder directed that it should be ‘of the Nature and Property of Local Motion and the application of the Doctrine thereof to explicate the causes and reasons of the Phenomena’. In the long passage of time since the Lecture was founded we inevitably turn more and more to the nature and property of local motion of the molecules of biological structures, till now, in fact, this concern with the molecular basis of things has become biology’s most noticeable feature. It is a sign of the times that a physicist should be invited to deliver this famous biological lecture and that he should propose to talk about the nature and property of local motion of the working molecules of the muscle structure. I want to do something more than that, though; I want to try to set the muscle story in its appropriate place in the wider scheme of biological fibres in general.