Abstract
SIR FREDERICK GOWLAND HOPKINS' published contributions to biochemistry are well known ; but as the time approaches of his relinquishing the Sir William Dunn chair of biochemistry at Cambridge, it is perhaps opportune to try to appraise his influence on the progress of the subject from 1899, when he took up work at Cambridge, to the present time. It has frequently been said in Great Britain during these years that “Hopkins is biochemistry” when he decided to make this subject his own, biochemistry, as he visualized it, scarcely existed either in Great Britain or on the Continent. This is not to minimize the monumental achievements of such men as Emil Fischer and Albrecht Kossel, his immediate forbears ; but while he fully appreciated the value and significance of this work, Sir Frederick visualized something beyond the isolation and description of the products and components of animal and vegetable tissue. He thought of biochemistry as a tracing out of the chemical events of the living cell, and a relating of these events to function and ultimately to growth itself. All his papers bear the impress of this idea, and to-day it is the accepted meaning of biochemistry. This change-over from the static to the dynamic is largely his work. Not only in his papers, but even more in his lectures and in his discussions over the work of his pupils, this idea was ever uppermost, and if it were possible to measure his influence on the progress of science, his direction of the thought of his pupils and colleagues into these channels would surely be his greatest achievement.
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Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, O.M., F.R.S. . Nature 151, 415–416 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/151415c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/151415c0