New funds may rejoin lab rent apart by feud

Decades after intense personal rivalry between two eminent scientists physically divided Cambridge University's then-new chemistry laboratories, Joint Infrastructure Fund cash looks set finally to help bridge the gap.

Such was the dislike between Lord Todd, who received a Nobel prize in 1957 for work on biochemistry and genetics, and Ronald Norrish, who got his Nobel prize ten years later for developing flash spectroscopy, that, according to myth, the laboratory was built in the 1950s in two parallel wings linked only at the front so as to keep apart the two professors and the departments they led.

Negotiations with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council over the refurbishment scheme cover reorganising and refitting up to a third of the laboratory's floorspace to provide some much-needed state-of-the-art facilities.

Howard Jones, academic secretary to the department, said the scheme should also include new links between the two wings.