– The Thackray Museum and the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology in partnership.

The Thackray Museum, together with Leeds University Library, has received one of the Local Heroes Scheme awards from the Royal Society to celebrate its Fellows during 2010 and has chosen William Astbury, professor of Biomolecular Structure at the University of Leeds. Hair Splitting Images – How William Astbury’s X-Ray Vision Changed the World is an exhibition at the Thackray Museum from 26 June 2010 until 2 January 2011. The project is also supported by the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, the Thackray Medical Research Trust and the British Society for the History of Science.

One of the exhibition’s objectives is to show how Astbury’s work remains important both now and in the future. It addresses such issues through collaboration with the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology at the University of Leeds, which carries out international quality research in all aspects of structural molecular biology. Its members work in biological sciences, physical sciences, engineering and medicine. The Astbury Centre is playing a key role in the project, giving visitors of all ages physical and intellectual access to a wide range of complex ideas, providing opportunities to visit research laboratories and encouraging stimulating debate.

William Astbury – a brief overview:

William Astbury became a Lecturer in Textile Physics and Director of the Textile Physics Laboratory in the Department of Textile Industries at the University of Leeds in 1928. His expertise in X-Ray diffraction photography and his analysis of the images created led him to develop X-ray crystallography techniques in order to be able to propose molecular structures for compounds more complex than crystals, notably biological materials. William Astbury was interested in determining the molecular structures of fibrous proteins such as keratin, which occurs in hair, wool and throughout the natural world. In 1931, he and his student Alexander Street took X-ray diffraction photographs of keratin, both in its natural state and when it was stretched. The pictures were very different, suggesting that the molecular structure had radically altered. The two forms identified were called ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’; Astbury and Street made the very important observation that the molecules were highly folded in the ‘alpha’ state, but were stretched out in the ‘beta’ state. Although the molecular structures they subsequently proposed were not strictly accurate, their work enabled Linus Pauling, Robert Corey and Herman Branson to confirm in 1951 that the shape for the ‘alpha’ form of keratin and other proteins is helical. Indeed, Pauling referred to this model as the ‘alpha helix’, retaining Astbury’s original nomenclature. Moreover, Astbury’s observation of transitions in fibrous proteins between alpha and beta forms remains relevant today, since several neurological diseases are linked to similar transitions in brain
proteins.

In 1937, William recruited a new research assistant called Florence Bell. Her post-graduate thesis, completed at Leeds in 1939, was called X-ray and Related Studies of the Structure of the Proteins and Nucleic acids. Nucleic acids carry the genetic information which is vital to successful reproduction of living organisms, but this was not known at that time. The most familiar nucleic acid is deoxyribonucleic acid, more commonly known as DNA.

Florence and William took the first X-ray diffraction photographs of DNA in 1938 and proposed a molecular structure for it, which became known as the ‘Pile of Pennies’ model. Although this theory proved to be incorrect; it became the basis for the work by Francis Crick and James Watson which enabled the definitive ‘Double Helix’ model to be calculated in 1953.

What does Hair Splitting Images – How William Astbury’s X-Ray Vision Changed the World seek to
achieve ?

It is important to recognise that the exhibition is not an attempt to teach museum visitors all about X-ray crystallography. This branch of science is highly complex and those who come to the exhibition with that degree of understanding will not need the exhibition to explain such sophisticated ideas to them. However, what is important for the visitor to grasp is that:

· X-ray crystallography is a technique used to predict molecular structures

· Astbury was able to use this method to identify the structures of compounds more complex than those for which the technique was originally intended

· Astbury was a pioneer and that science is a progressive process. The fact that his conclusions proved to be incorrect and that the answers to problems he was trying to solve often took other scientists over fifteen years to discover is illustrative of what scientific enquiry is all about.

· The Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology is a leading research institution. It remains at the University of Leeds where Astbury also worked and perpetuates his reputation by naming itself after him. Its members come from University Departments in Physics, Chemistry, Biological sciences and Molecular Medicine. Research topics are undertaken here by approximately two hundred and fifty researchers, including Structural Biology, Molecular Biophysics, Bionanoscience, Chemical Biology and Molecular Interactions in Cells. The Centre’s research leaders hold grants totalling almost £50 million.

Why link William Astbury to the twenty-first century?

The world inhabited by William Astbury and his circle was totally different from today and visitors to the exhibition will have the opportunity to see the work currently being undertaken at the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology. They will be able to see the laboratories and meet researchers. The Science Clubs that are being held at the museum and at the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology over five weeks in July and August 2010 will give participants the opportunity to find out:

e. How scientific experiments are conducted

f. About wool as an example of one of Astbury’s areas of study

g. How to make a pin-hole camera and understand the principles of photography

h. Globular proteins

i. How to ‘make’ DNA.

However, it is important that they do this against the historical backdrop that the exhibition offers and to grasp a sense of what William Astbury’s scientific environment was like. There were no computers; all notes were hand-written or produced on typewriters. William Astbury’s X-ray camera (on display in the exhibition) had only limited lead sheeting to protect the user. Scientific enquiry only advances because of that which has gone before; someone has an idea, a hypothesis is proposed and this is then tested by experimentation. The hypothesis becomes continually refined in the light of the experimental evidence gained. For example, scientists after Astbury were able to improve upon his theories by varying the angle of incidence of the X-ray beam (Astbury always had the beam aimed at 90 degrees to the test sample) to gain additional analytical information, or by using a wider piece of photographic film that enabled them to ‘capture’ additional data from more widely diffracted X-rays.

How to link William Astbury to the twenty-first century?

The Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology is an ideal way to impart the notion that William’s work did not die with him in 1961, but rather that his work is both continuing in the present and will do so into the future. The exhibition layout is designed to guide the visitor around the gallery in a clockwise rotation, engaging with the exhibition’s narrative in a chronological manner. Display panels about the Astbury Centre have therefore been deliberately placed at the ‘end’ of the exhibition, so that by the time that visitors are looking at them, they will already have ‘met’ William. They will know what he looked like, they will have heard him giving lectures and they will have had the chance to see audio-visual clips on a touch-screen monitor featuring interviews with those who knew him personally. The exhibition also contains many of William’s quotations, which help to create an accurate impression of his remarkable personality. The Astbury Centre’s logo, which includes a diagrammatic representation of the ‘alpha’ to ‘beta’ protein transmission, can therefore be easily explained at this point as the ideas behind the design will have already been explained on previous panels. The exhibition has also taken care to select examples of the Astbury Centre’s very wide-ranging scope of research which clearly link to the work that William Astbury was doing almost a century earlier. For example, Astbury’s X-ray observations have contributed to our understanding of amyloid protein fibres, which can be observed in patients suffering from many diseases that affect the nervous system, such as such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. Amyloids are also important for human health; they are involved in skin colouring and in the ‘storage’ of hormones. Research into amyloid disease is one of the major projects in the Astbury Centre today and is a particularly good example of how William’s ‘legacy’ continues.

How does Hair Splitting Images – How William Astbury’s X-Ray Vision Changed the World link to contemporary biomedicine?

There are large molecular models of keratin in both ‘alpha’ (unstretched) and ‘beta’ (stretched) forms on display. It is explained that keratin is present in many aspects of the natural world, such as hair, wool, porcupines’ quills, cows’ horns, birds’ feathers, reptiles’ scales and whalebone.

Visitors can understand not only just how complex these biological compounds are, but can also count the carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen atoms to see that the same numbers of atoms are present in two very differently shaped molecules. They can also ‘pick out’ the helical pattern of the ‘alpha’ form. Visitors also have the opportunity to construct a model of DNA as an interactive exercise. They learn about cytosine, guanine, adenine, thymine, ‘sugars’ and ‘phosphates’ in order to build a ‘double helix’ DNA strand.

The exhibition also refers to increasing demands on Astbury’s research department from the medical profession after he had acquired an electron microscope from America in 1944. At that time it was one of only seven in the country. Electron microscopy proved particularly useful in medical research, especially areas relating to rheumatism and dentistry, as it gave very accurate images of collagen, the fibre-like protein found in bones and teeth.

The sense of scale of the ‘molecular world’ is also explained; distances between the atoms in the large molecular models are in reality only tenths of millionths of millimetres in length. This gives the visitor an insight into contemporary biomedical research and a sense of appreciation of how today’s scientists are able to achieve major advances in cellular knowledge within an environment that is completely invisible to the naked eye.

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