Cambridge University has become embroiled in a row over claims that scientists including the late Professor Stephen Hawking benefited from slavery.

The university’s Fitzwilliam Museum is holding an exhibition titled Rise Up, which covers abolition movements, rebellions and modern-day “racist injustices”.

It claims that figures including George Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son, were supported by investments in the slave trade.

A catalogue that accompanies the exhibition also states that Hawking and others benefited from slavery-derived funds given to Cambridge two centuries before the physicist was born.

But Cambridge professors and leading historians have hit back at the claims.

Dons have insisted that the claims are based on a misreading of history and have asked Cambridge to correct the record – a request which the university has refused.

The foreword to the exhibition book states that while “facts continue to matter” in discussions of slavery, “anger, frustration and sadness – historic and present – are also important considerations”.

A central claim in the book is that “slave trade financial instruments shaped the intellectual life of the university by supporting the country’s most renowned mathematicians and scientists”.

The museum itself welcomes visitors with a sign setting out its own links to the slave trade.

Hawking, Darwin, physicist Arthur Eddington, and “father of the computer” Charles Babbage held Lucasian and Plumian professorships respectively.