William Thomas Astbury FRS (25 February 1898 – 4 June 1961) was an English physicist and molecular biologist who made pioneering X-ray diffraction studies of biological molecules.

[citation needed] Astbury might well have become a potter but, luckily, won a scholarship to Longton High School, where his interests were shaped by the Headmaster and second master, both chemists.

This work led him to the conviction that the best way to understand the complexity of living systems was through studying the shape of the giant macromolecules from which they are made – an approach which he popularised with passion as 'molecular biology'.

His other great passion was classical music and once said that protein fibres such as keratin in wool were 'the chosen instruments on which nature has played so many incomparable themes, and countless variations and harmonies'[5] These two passions converged when in 1960 he presented an X-ray image taken by his research assistant Elwyn Beighton of a fibre of keratin protein in a lock of hair that was said to have come from Mozart – who was one of Astbury's favourite composers.

Secondly, they did this work at a time when most scientists thought that proteins were the carrier of hereditary information and that DNA was a dull monotonous molecule of little interest other than perhaps as a structural component.

Avery and his team had shown that nucleic acid could pass on the property of virulence in pneumococcus and thus offered the first strong evidence that DNA might be the hereditary material.

[11] Astbury described Avery's work as 'one of the most remarkable discoveries of our time'[12] and it inspired him with the vision that, in the aftermath of World War 2, he would established a new department at Leeds that would become a national centre to blaze the trail for the new science of molecular biology.

The first was the elucidation of the mechanism by which thrombin acts as a protease to catalyse the formation of the major component of blood clots, the insoluble protein fibrin, from its soluble precursor fibrinogen by Laszlo Lorand, a young PhD student who had fled his native Hungary to join Astbury.

The second development was a series of new X-ray photographs of B-form DNA taken in 1951 by Astbury's research assistant Elwyn Beighton which the historian of science, Professor Robert Olby has since said was 'clearly the famous B-pattern found by Rosalind Franklin and R. Gosling'.

Franklin and Gosling's 'Photo 51' provided one of several important clues to Watson and Crick -but Astbury's response to Beighton's very similar X-ray images of DNA could not have been more different.

One explanation is that, although Astbury recognised the importance of DNA, he did not understand that biological information was carried in the one-dimensional sequence of bases within the molecule but rather, that it resided in subtle and elaborate variations in its three-dimensional structure.

Despite this missed opportunity, Astbury, together with Florence Bell, had made a major contribution by showing that the methods of X-ray crystallography could be used to reveal the regular, ordered structure of DNA.

In the late 1930s Astbury and his collaborators A.C. Chibnall and Kennet Bailey showed that by chemical treatment, the molecular chains of soluble seed proteins could be refolded to make them into insoluble fibres.

To demonstrate the feasibility of this idea, ICI made an entire overcoat from Ardil which Astbury regularly sported to lectures and in the end, although Ardil did not prove to be the salvation of the British textile industry, it did serve as a powerful illustration of Astbury's conviction that not only could we solve the structure of giant biomolecules such as proteins and DNA using X-rays, but that we might also then deliberately manipulate these structures for our own practical purposes.

This was an idea which truly came of age in the mid- to late 1970s with the rise of recombinant DNA technology by which time Astbury was dead but as his friend and colleague, J.D.Bernal wrote in an obituary to him, 'His monument will be found in the whole of molecular biology'.

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".