King's College London
In 1946, John T Randall - who had as Ph.D. advisor the Nobel-Prize winning physicist, William Lawrence Bragg - was appointed Head of Physics Department at King’s College in London. He then moved to the Wheatstone chair of physics at King's College London, where the Medical Research Council set up the Biophysics Research Unit with Randall as the director (now known as Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics) at King's College London. During his term as Director the experimental work leading to the discovery of the structure of DNA was made there by Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling, Maurice Wilkins, Alex Stokes and Herbert R. Wilson. He assigned Raymond Gosling as a PhD student to Dr. R. Franklin to work on DNA structure by X-ray diffraction. (see letter from Randall to Franklin at http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/retrieve/ResourceMetadata/KRBBBB )
Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine with James Watson and Francis Crick; Rosalind Franklin had already died from cancer in 1958.
In addition to the X-Ray diffraction work the unit conducted a wide-ranging programme of research by physicists, biochemists, and biologists. The use of new types of light microscopes led to the important proposal in 1954 of the sliding filament mechanism for muscle contraction. Randall was also successful in integrating the teaching of biosciences at King's College.
In 1951 he set up a large multidisciplinary group working under his personal direction to study the structure and growth of the connective tissue protein collagen. Their contribution helped to elucidate the three-chain structure of the collagen molecule. Randall himself specialized in using the electron microscope, first studying the fine structure of spermatozoa and then concentrating on collagen. In 1958 he published a study of the structure of protozoa. He set up a new group to use the cilia of protozoa as a model system for the analysis of morphogenesis by correlating the structural and biochemical differences in mutants.
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