Abstract
DR. F. J. W. ROUGHTON, who succeeds Prof. E. K. Rideal in the John Humphrey Plummer professorship of colloid science in the University of Cambridge, is a physiologist admirably qualified to deal with the border-line between biological and physical science. Since his election to a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1923, his researches have been concerned with the carriage of gases by the blood and with the physical chemistry of the blood pigments. His best-known work is that begun with Meldrum on the enzyme carbonic anhydrase, which plays an important part in the transport of carbon dioxide from the tissues to the lungs. Physical chemists will remember also the ingenious methods which he used with Hartridge to study the rapid rate of combination of oxygen with hæmoglobin. Largely as the result of his work, the complex interchanges between the corpuscles and the plasma in the lung capillaries are far more clearly understood. His wide knowledge of physico-chemical techniques and of their application to biological problems has made him an authority in a field which is rapidly becoming one of the growing points in natural science ; and physiologists will wish him every success in an appointment which will give full scope to his talent for reducing biological equations to measurable terms.
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Prof. F. J. W. Roughton, F. R. S. Nature 159, 122 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1038/159122c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/159122c0