Peterhouse, the Royal Society and molecular biology

The term molecular biology was coined by Warren Weaver, a mathematician who was head of the natural sciences section of the Rockefeller Foundation, in his report to the president of the Foundation in 1938. The origins of the subject may be located in various places or periods, but Sir Peter Medawar used to argue that it was Sir William Bragg and W.T. Astbury at the Davy Faraday Laboratory in London who began it, when they investigated the structures of materials such as silk, wool and hair by X-ray diffraction. Others say that J.D. Bernal was the progenitor. Peterhouse, a Cambridge college, was a hothouse of the subject.