Abstract
THE Montreal General Hospital has established an Institute of Special Research and Cell Metabolism under the direction of Dr. I. M. Rabinowitch, and has appointed Dr. J. H. Quastel as director of the Enzyme Research Division and associate director of the Institute, while McGill University has simultaneously announced his appointment to a professorship in the Department of Biochemistry, the chairman of which is Prof. D. L. Thomson. Prof. J. H. Quastel graduated at the Royal College of Science, London, and went to Cambridge in 1921 as a research student under the late Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins. These were the pioneering days of enzymology, which saw its development into an exact science, and it was to this field that Prof. Quastel made some of his most important contributions. His exhaustive studies of the resting metabolism of bacteria, which form the basis of present-day microbiological techniques, led to the characterization of new enzyme systems, while his discovery of the specific competitive inhibitors of enzyme action has had the widest application in this field. Prof. Quastel's fundamental contribution at this time was his work on the reversibility of dehydro-genase action. Working with succinic dehydrogenase, he showed that the change in free energy determined from the observed equilibrium point agreed closely with the value calculated from thermal data.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Prof. J. H. Quastel, F.R.S. Nature 159, 802–803 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1038/159802c0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/159802c0