The Medical Research Council (MRC), formerly the Medical Research Committee, is a government-sponsored national funding body for medical research in Britain. The Medical Research Committee was established on 20 June 1913 as an independent body responsible for the organisation of state-funded medical research. The financial support for this work was provided by a subsection of the 1911 National Insurance Act, which set aside £57,000 a year for research purposes. Although initially earmarked for combatting tuberculosis (TB), the Committee was given the freedom to pursue a much broader set of investigations into health and disease. In 1914, Cambridge physiologist Walter Morley Fletcher (1873-1933) was appointed the first Secretary of the Committee. In the same year, work began on the construction of a central research institute for the Committee in Hampstead, London, which opened as the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) in 1920. After the First World War, the Committee was implicated in larger-scale debates about the reorganisation of government and public services. The Machinery of Government Committee, also known as the Haldane Committee, determined that the Medical Research Committee should remain independent of departmental oversight and separate from the recently established Ministry of Health. This decision was confirmed by the granting of a Royal Charter to the newly-christened Medical Research Council on 20 March 1920. The Charter freed the MRC from its original financial provisions under the 1911 Act and instead provided direct parliamentary funding at the discretion of the Committee of Privy Council for Medical Research. In practice, the Privy Council exerted little influence on the day-to-day running of the MRC, with research priorities and staff appointments largely made in-house. While the Second World War (1939-1945) and the foundation of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948 encouraged closer collaboration between the MRC and government departments, the Council’s autonomy remained largely intact throughout the twentieth-century. Following the 1965 Science and Technology Act and the subsequent abolition of the Privy Council, funding authority over the MRC passed to the Secretary of State for Education and Science. Following a series of departmental closures and mergers in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, financial responsibility for the MRC has been held by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy since 2016.

Approval for a nuclear physics research laboratory at Daresbury was given by the Minister for Science in 1963. The high-energy particle accelerator NINA (Northern Institute's Nuclear Accelerator) was constructed between 1963 and 1965 and first operated in 1966. The Daresbury Nuclear Physics Laboratory officially opened in 1967. Synchrotron Radiation (SR) research began at Daresbury Laboratory in 1968, with the approval of a Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SRF) that made use of radiation from NINA. The SRF was built between 1970 and 1972, and ran until 1977, when NINA closed. The first international symposium for SR users took place at Daresbury Laboratory in 1973 and provided early impetus for the development of the world's first dedicated X-ray SR source. The second-generation Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS), a purpose-built storage ring for SR research, was approved in October 1974. The four-year construction project began in April 1975. Construction and commissioning of the linac and booster synchrotron was completed in 1979. Construction of the electron storage ring was completed in 1980. 30 June 1980 saw the circulation of the first beam in the storage ring. Construction of the first two beamlines was completed the same year and on 7 November 1980 the SRS was formally opened by the Minister of State for Science. The first scheduled operation of the SRS for users started in spring 1981, and the electron beam operating current and energy achieved full design specification in March 1982. In November 1982, a 5-tesla superconducting wiggler magnet came into operation to extend the spectrum of X-rays available to higher energies. SR research grew rapidly in the 1980s, and in October 1986 the SRS was shut down for an upgrade to the High Brightness Lattice (HBL). Construction was completed in March 1987. Following the recommissioning of the storage ring and beamlines in September 1987, attention was focused on improving the quality of the photon beam for users. This involved modernising all beamline photon-position monitoring systems and upgrading the systems used to monitor and control electron beam position. A 6 tesla wiggler unit was installed between November 1991 and June 1992, and came into use in July 1993. In 1997 a share of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to Dr. John Walker for research involving data collection at the SRS - this is believed to be the only Nobel Prize to include work on a SR source. A second major rebuilding of the storage ring happened from October to December 1998, when two 2 tesla hybrid permanent magnet multipole wigglers, designed at Daresbury, were installed. Between 2000 and 2004, a further three enhancements to the SRS took place: a protein crystallography facility; a 2.4 tesla hybrid permanent magnet multipole wiggler; and an advanced infra-red beamline. User operation of the SRS ended in August 2008. SR research transferred to the DIAMOND third generation synchrotron facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxford in 2008. Daresbury Laboratory continues to operate as a research facility in fields such as accelerator science, bio-medicine, physics, chemistry, materials, engineering and computational science. It is now part of Sci-Tech Daresbury, one of two national science and innovation campuses, which supports scientists, researchers and industry by providing a collaborative and innovative environment to perform cutting-edge research.