ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one of its facets the institutional context, with a special emphasis on the Royal Institution. When the post of Director of the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory was offered to him after C. Andrade's forced resignation partly out of a sense of family loyalty to the Institution, and partly so that he could remain involved in research beyond the age of retirement. Although the importance of William and Lawrence Bragg and of their school of X-ray crystallography has been acknowledged in histories of molecular biology, the role of the Royal Institution has not been fully researched. While molecular biology itself is made up of many different strands, the history of molecular biology follows different 'pathways' according to the national contexts in which it is being studied. However, French X- ray crystallographers did not contribute to the development of molecular biology in France in the same way or to the same extent as they did in Britain.
