3. Who was J T Randall and why was a biophysics unit founded at King’s?

The study of physics at King’s has a long and distinguished pedigree numbering several Nobel Prize winners including Charles Barkla, Sir Owen Richardson and Sir Edward Appleton for important work on x-rays, thermionics and atmospheric physics. During the nineteenth century, notables included the famous physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who undertook groundbreaking research on thermodynamics, and Charles Wheatstone, who pioneered the development of the telegraph and stereoscopy, and who was commemorated in the research laboratories that bore his name.

The post-Second World War period witnessed the establishment in 1946 of a biophysics unit in collaboration with the Royal Society. Its work soon came under the auspices of the Medical Research Council (MRC) in March 1947 with the formation of the Biophysics Research Unit under John Turton Randall as its first Director. Randall, Wheatstone Professor of Physics at King’s, had hitherto enjoyed a successful career as a research physicist at GEC and at the University of Birmingham where he had undertaken crucial work for the Admiralty developing the cavity magnetron that transformed the performance of radar. His focus at the new King’s Unit lay in the study of cells, and in particular in overseeing the design and building of bespoke equipment with which to investigate the microscopic processes that underlay cell function and division. Perhaps Randall’s greatest facility was in recognising talent and motivating staff and he assembled a youthful team comprising around 30 biologists, biochemists and physicists.

Research required the design of new polarized ultra-violet and infra-red detection equipment and new designs of spherical-mirror reflecting objectives and advanced interferometers to give interference photographs of small-scale structures. The primary objectives during the early years lay in enzyme research, crystalline bodies in cells and the dichromism and other characteristics shown by nucleic acids, but the Unit also achieved distinction for pioneering studies determining the sliding-filament mechanism of muscle contraction under the supervision of Professor Jean Hanson. The Unit relocated from the Wheatstone laboratories on the Strand to a new site in Drury Lane in 1964 and later became the Randall Institute in memory of its founding Director, who died in 1984. The Institute is now based at New Hunt’s House on the Guy’s campus. Its research draws on the traditional strengths of biophysics at King’s, including muscle and cell motility and structural biology using x-ray crystallography of proteins.