Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

The Parker Library is the rare books and manuscripts library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It is known throughout the world due to its... invaluable collection of over 600 manuscripts, particularly medieval texts, the majority of which were bequeathed to the College by Archbishop Matthew Parker. The library houses a significant proportion of all extant Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in the world, including the earliest copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle , the Old English Bede, and King Alfred’s translation of Pastoral Care , as well as the Latin St. Augustine Gospels, one of the oldest bound books in existence. The collection also includes key Middle English texts, such as the Ancrene Wisse, the Brut Chronicle and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Other items include medieval travelogues and maps, apocalypses, bestiaries, one of the oldest pieces of extant written music, and illuminated manuscripts, such as the Bury Bible and the Chronica Majora by Matthew Paris . A full, alphabetised catalogue is available here.
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David Mervyn Blow was an influential British biophysicist. He was best known for the development of X-ray crystallography, a technique used to... determine the molecular structures of tens of thousands of biological molecules. This has been extremely important to the pharmaceutical industry. Blow was born in Birmingham, England. As a youth, he attended Kingswood School in Bath, England, where he won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He then spent two years at MIT and the National Institutes of Health. In 1954 he met Max Perutz, and they began to study a new technique wherein X-rays would be passed through a protein sample. This eventually led to the creation of a three-dimensional structure of haemoglobin. He became professor of biophysics at Imperial College London in 1977. Fellow of the Royal Society in 1972. Blow married Mavis Sears in 1955, and they had two children. Blow died of lung cancer at the age of 72, in Appledore, England.
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