Frederick Gowland Hopkins

Hopkins, Frederick Gowland (1861-1947) British Biochemist Frederick Gowland Hopkins was born on June 20, 1861, at Eastbourne, England, to a bookseller in Bishopsgate Street, London, who died when Frederick was an infant. 

Mid-July, 1912 Frederick Gowland Hopkins, a biochemist at Cambridge University, published an elaborate paper demonstrating that additions of small amounts of fresh, whole milk to otherwise deficient diets of experimental rats were followed by periods of normal growth and development of the animals. (2)... 

In December 1929, Frederick Gowland Hopkins shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology, "for his discovery of the growth-stimulating vitamins."... 

Frederick Gowland Hopkins, analytical chemist, physician and biochemist, had conducted numerous experiments in animal feeding prior to his famous comment in 1906 that no animal could live on a diet of pure protein, fat, carbohydrate, minerals and water. He cited the simple fact that animals live upon plants or other animals whose tissues contain many other substances besides those usually considered adequate for a normal diet, "...it is certain that there are many minor factors in all diets of which the body takes account." (11)... 

Before 1900, many experiments suggested that dietary components other than protein, carbohydrate, fat and minerals were needed for survival. However, it was Frederick Gowland Hopkins who provided the evidence that minute amounts of unknown substances, present in normal foods, were essential for normal healthy life. His eminence in the scientific community ensured that the work and ideas were accepted he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in 1929. 

Universal discovered by Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins (UK, shared Nobel Prize, Medicine, 1929, growth stimulating vitamins) enzymatic synthesis studied by Konrad Bloch (Germany/ USA, Nobel Prize, Physiology/ Medicine, 1964, cholesterol biosynthesis)... 

Finally, and especially, my thanks are due to Professor Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, at whose suggestion the book was written and to whose influence alone I owe the incentive to think on biochemical matters.58... 

Dale, H. H. (1948/1949). Frederick Gowland Hopkins, 1861-1947. Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 6 115-145. 

Stephenson, M. (1948). Obituary notice Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1861—1947). Biochemical Journal 42 161—169. 

Hopkins, F. G. (1949). Autobiography of Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins. In Needham, J. and Baldwin, E. (eds.), Hopkins and Biochemistry, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 3-25. 

Kamminga, H. and Weatherall, M. W. (1996). The making of a biochemist. I Frederick Gowland Hopkins construction of dynamic biochemistry. Medical History 40 269-292. 

Life with biochemistry—indeed with all sciences—is not always as solemn as the textbooks and scientific periodicals suggest. From 1923 to 1931 the Cambridge Biochemical Laboratory, at that time under Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, one of the world s foremost centres of biochemistry, published once a year a highly original and amusing house journal called Brighter Biochemistry. 

Hopkins was knighted in 1925 and received the Order of Merit in 1935. Hopkins died in 1947, at the age of 86. The Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins Memorial Lecture of the Biochemical Society, named in his honor, is presented by a lecturer to assess the impact of recent advances in his or her particular field on developments in biochemistry. The award is made every two or three years, and the lecturer is presented with a medal and 1,000. 

Christiaan Eijkman, Frederick Gowland Hopkins Antineuritic vitamin and the growth-stimulating vitamins... 

In 1931 Krebs moved to Freiburg to teach medicine. It was there that he authored (with Kurt Henseleit) his first important paper, which examined liver function in mammals and described how ammonia was converted to urea in liver cells. Krebs also studied the syntheses of uric acid and purines in birds. However, Krebs s research was cut short when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Krebs was Jewish, and he was therefore summarily fired fiom his post. He left Germany for England, taking a position at the School of Biochemistry at Cambridge University at the invitation of Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins (who had won the 1929 Nobel Prize in medicine). In 1935 Krebs moved to the University of Sheffield to become a lecturer in pharmacology. 

But what are the elusive ingredients in citrus fruits and rice hulls that prevent these deficiency diseases The late 19th century wimessed trendy attempts to produce synthetic animal feed using pure proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and minerals. The results were vastly inferior compared to animals raised on namral food. In 1906, British biochemist Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1861-1947) (1929 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine) recognized the existence in natural foods of accessory factors, beyond the major components, that are required for a healthy diet. 

Initially amino acids were hard to identify because reaction conditions used by chemists to break up the protein usually destroyed amino acids in the process. But as techniques improved, these units were identified by such chemists as Emil Fischer, Sidney W. Cole, and Frederick Gowland Hopkins. The difficulty was then to decide how amino acids were joined to make up different proteins. In the mid-1940s the first complete analysis of the sequence of amino acids that makes up a protein was achieved. More quickly followed, such as the work by Frederick Sanger in which he unraveled the amino acid sequence for insulin. 

Frederick Gowland Hopkins, a preeminent biochemist known for his discovery of tryptophan, glutathione, and the requirement for vitamins in the human diet (which earned him a Nobel Prize in 1929), invited Muriel in 1914 to join his research group in Cambridge (Fig. 7.3). There, she wrote The Anthocyanin Pigments of Plants (and also a revised edition, published in 1925) and a university textbook. Practical Plant Biochemistry, and focused her research on the oxidative reactions with anthocyanins. 

Fig. 7.3 Members of Frederick Gowland Hopkin s research group in 1917. Standing George Windfield, Ginsaburo Totani, Sydney W. Cole, F.G. Hcpkins. Seated H.M. Spiers, Elfrida Cornish, Harold Raistrick, Elsie Bulley, Dorothy Jordan-Lloyd, Muriel Wheldale [Onslow]. Photograph courtesy of the Department of Biochemistry, Cambridge University.

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