Longton High School, Box Lane Meir, Staffordshire, ST3 5PR England, United Kingdom
Astbury won a scholarship to Longton High School, where his interests were shaped by the Headmaster and second master, both chemists.
College/University
Gallery of William Thomas
Jesus College, Cambridge, Jesus Ln, Cambridge CB5 8BL, England, United Kingdom
After becoming head boy and winning the Duke of Sutherland's Gold Medal, Astbury won the only local scholarship available and went up to Jesus College, Cambridge.
Gallery of William Thomas
the University of Cambridge, The Old Schools, Trinity Ln, Cambridge CB2 1TN, England, United Kingdom
Astbury graduated from the University of Cambridge with the degree in physics in 1921.
Career
Gallery of William Thomas
William Thomas Astbury, 1898 – 1961, English physicist and molecular biologist who made pioneering X-ray diffraction studies of biological molecules.
Gallery of William Thomas
William Thomas Astbury, 1898 – 1961.
Gallery of William Thomas
William Thomas Astbury, 1898 – 1961, English physicist and molecular biologist.
Gallery of William Thomas
Crystallographic photo of Sodium Thymonucleate, Type B. "Photo 51." May 1952. Creator: Rosalind Franklin, Raymond G. Gosling.
Achievements
Membership
the Royal Society of London
1940 - 1961
Astbury was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1940.
Jesus College, Cambridge, Jesus Ln, Cambridge CB5 8BL, England, United Kingdom
After becoming head boy and winning the Duke of Sutherland's Gold Medal, Astbury won the only local scholarship available and went up to Jesus College, Cambridge.
William Thomas Astbury was an British physicist and molecular biologist. He is famous for making a pioneering X-ray diffraction studies of biological molecules. His work on keratin provided the foundation for Linus Pauling's discovery of the alpha helix. He also studied the structure for DNA in 1937 and made the first step in the elucidation of its structure.
Background
William Thomas Astbury was born on February 25, 1898, in Longton, Staffordshire, England. Astbury was the fourth child of seven, born to William Edwin Astbury, who was a potter and provided comfortably for his family. Astbury also had a younger brother, Norman, with whom he shared a love of music.
Education
Astbury might well have become a potter, just like his father, but he won a scholarship to Longton High School, where his interests were shaped by the Headmaster and second master, both chemists. After becoming head boy and winning the Duke of Sutherland's Gold Medal, Astbury won the only local scholarship available and went up to Jesus College, Cambridge.
After two terms at Cambridge, his studies were interrupted by service during the First World War. A poor medical rating following appendectomy resulted in his posting in 1917 to Cork, Ireland with the Royal Army Medical Corps. He later returned to Cambridge and finished his last year with a specialization in physics graduating in 1921.
After graduating from Cambridge, Astbury read chemistry at Cambridge and began research under Sir William Bragg at University College, London, in 1921, moving with him to the Royal Institution in 1923. In 1928 Astbury was appointed a lecturer in textile physics at the University of Leeds, then reader, and finally professor of biomolecular structure. He remained at Leeds for the remainder of his career, being appointed Reader in Textile Physics in 1937 and Professor of Biomolecular Structure in 1946. He held the chair until his death in 1961.
In London, Astbury worked on the structure of tartaric acids, measured diffraction intensities photometrically, and, with Kathleen Lonsdale, produced the first tables of space groups. His assignment at Leeds was the structure of natural and synthetic fibers, especially wool. In 1930 he discovered that two diffraction patterns can be produced from the same wool fiber by exposing it to the X-ray beam when relaxed and when under tension. On the meridian the relaxed fiber showed a prominent spot at 5.1 A., and the stretched fiber a spot at 3.4 A. Astbury concluded that the long polypeptide chains which make up the keratin fiber are folded into a series of hexagons resembling diketopiperazines in structure, and are spaced 5.1 A. apart. When the wool fiber is stretched, these hexagon folds are pulled out into long chains in which the residue repeat is at 3.4 A. He noted the similarity of this stretched, or beta, form of keratin to silk, and proposed for both a two-dimensional grid structure, the cross-links between the polypeptide chains being through salt linkages and sulfur bridges.
Henceforth, Astbury’s work was dominated by this theory of the reversible transformation of keratin. In 1940 Hans Neurath showed that the amino acid side chains could not be accommodated in his structures, so in 1941 Astbury, with Florence Bell, modified them; but when the alpha helix and pleated sheets were proposed by Linus Pauling in 1951, Astbury’s models were discarded.
In 1937 Astbury and Florence Bell took the first good X-ray pictures of sodium thymonucleate and discovered the strong meridional spot at 3.4 A. In 1946 Astbury assigned this spot to the eighth layer line, and Mansel M. Davies built a single-chain “pile of plates” model with a chemical repeat at 27 A. From model-building, Davies recognized that the planes of sugar and purine or pyrimidine must be at right angles and that the most likely phosphate ester linkages are between C3 and C5.
Although Astbury’s structures for proteins were all wrong in detail, they represent the first attempt at molecular models in which specific cross-linkages hold the polypeptide chains in a characteristic conformation. His suggestion of the folding and unfolding of these chains as the basis of extensibility of fibrous proteins and of the denaturation process of globular proteins was correct in essence. Nowhere did he utilize helical models, but his picture of DNA as a dense molecule with the bases stacked one above another 3.4 A. apart was the first step toward the elucidation of its structure.
As a pioneer, Astbury was bound to see his work superseded, but by his enthusiasm and mastery of the art of lecturing, he drew others into the then-young field of molecular biology. He provided the stimulus to the more detailed and reliable work of his successors.
Astbury, exposed fibres of much more complex protein molecules, such as hair, horn, tendon, silk, feather and muscle, to X-rays and showed that the diffraction patterns he obtained belonged to a limited number of classes. He labelled two major classes alpha and beta, that we now know to be major building blocks of complex protein structures, and even showed that transitions between them could be induced by mechanical stretching and relaxing. This transition between the alpha-helix and beta-strand forms is represented in the ACSMB logo.
Quotations:
“We are at the dawn of a new era, the era of 'molecular biology' as I like to call it, and there is an urgency about the need for more intensive application of physics and chemistry, and specially of structure analysis, that is still not sufficiently appreciated.”
In 1946 Astbury presented a paper at a symposium in Cambridge in which he said: "Biosynthesis is supremely a question of fitting molecules or parts of molecules against another, and one of the great biological developments of our time is the realisation that probably the most fundamental interaction of all is that between the proteins and the nucleic acids."
"[Molecular biology] is concerned particularly with the forms of biological molecules and with the evolution, exploitation and ramification of these forms in the ascent to higher and higher levels of organisation. Molecular biology is predominantly three-dimensional and structural - which does not mean, however, that it is merely a refinement of morphology. It must at the same time inquire into genesis and function."
"Pauling was shocked by the freedom with which the X-ray crystallographers of the time, including particularly Astbury, played with the intimate chemical structure of their models. They seemed to think that if the atoms were arranged in the right order and about the right distance apart, that was all that mattered, that no further restrictions need to be put on them."
Membership
Astbury was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1940.
the Royal Society of London
,
United Kingdom
1940 - 1961
Personality
Astbury was an excellent writer and lecturer; his works are characterized by remarkable clarity and an easy-going, natural manner. He was known for his unfailing cheerfulness, idealism, imagination, and enthusiasm. He foresaw correctly the tremendous impact of molecular biology and transmitted his vision to his students, "his euphoric evangelizing zeal transforming laboratory routine into a great adventure". Astbury's enthusiasm may also account for an occasional lack of scientific caution observable in his work; Astbury could make speculative interpretations sound plausible.
The Nobel Prize-winning Austrian scientist Max Perutz once hailed Astbury's laboratory at Leeds as "the X-ray Vatican".
Interests
music, piano, violin
Connections
Astbury met Frances Gould when he was stationed in Cork, Ireland with the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I. They married in 1922 and had a son, Bill, and a daughter, Maureen.