Ernst Chain
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Sir Ernst Boris Chain (June 19, 1906 – August 12, 1979) was a German-born British biochemist, and a 1945 co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work on penicillin.
Chain was born in Berlin to a Russian father who moved from his birthland to study chemistry abroad, and a German Berliner mother. In 1930, he received his degree in chemistry from Friedrich Wilhelm University. After the Nazis came to power, Chain knew that he, being a Jew, would no longer be safe in Germany. He left Germany in 1933 and moved to England.
He began working on phospholipids at Cambridge University under the direction of Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins. In 1935, he accepted a job at Oxford University as a lecturer in pathology. During this time he worked on a range of research topics, including snake venoms, tumour metabolism, lysozymes, and biochemistry techniques.
In 1939, he joined Howard Florey to investigate natural antibacterial agents produced by microorganisms. This led him and Florey to revisit the work of Alexander Fleming, who had described penicillin nine years previously. Chain and Florey went on to discover penicillin's therapeutic action and its chemical composition. It was Chain who worked out how to isolate and concentrate penicillin. He also theorized the structure of penicillin, which was confirmed by x-ray crystallography done by Dorothy Hodgkin. For this research, Chain, Florey, and Fleming received the Nobel Prize in 1945.
Towards the end of World War II, Chain learned his mother and sister had perished in the war. After World War II, Chain moved to Rome, Italy to work at the Istituto Superiore di Sanita (Superior Institute of Health). He returned to Britain in 1964 as head of the biochemistry department at Imperial College London.
In 1948, he married Anne Beloff, sister of Max Beloff and Nora Beloff. In his later life, his Jewish identity became increasingly important to him. He became a member of the board of governors of the Weizmann Institute of Science at Rehovot in 1954, and later a member of the executive council. He raised his children securely within the Jewish faith, arranging much extra-curricular tuition for them. His views were expressed most clearly in his speech ‘Why I am a Jew’ given at the World Jewish Congress Conference of Intellectuals in 1965.[1]
After his retirement, he moved to the west of Ireland.
References
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
- Nobel Lectures, Physiology or Medicine 1942-1962, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1964
External links
Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine |
|---|
Johannes Fibiger (1926) · Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1927) · Charles Nicolle (1928) · Christiaan Eijkman / Frederick Hopkins (1929) · Karl Landsteiner (1930) · Otto Warburg (1931) · Charles Sherrington / Edgar Adrian (1932) · Thomas Morgan (1933) · George Whipple / George Minot / William Murphy (1934) · Hans Spemann (1935) · Henry Dale / Otto Loewi (1936) · Albert Szent-Györgyi (1937) · Corneille Heymans (1938) · Gerhard Domagk (1939) · Henrik Dam / Edward Doisy (1943) · Joseph Erlanger / Herbert Gasser (1944) · Alexander Fleming / Ernst Chain / Howard Florey (1945) · Hermann Muller (1946) · Carl Cori / Gerty Cori / Bernardo Houssay (1947) · Paul Müller (1948) · Walter Hess / Egas Moniz (1949) · Edward Kendall / Tadeusz Reichstein / Philip Hench (1950) |
| Complete roster · 1901–1925 · 1926–1950 · 1951–1975 · 1976–2000 · 2001–present |
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Acknowledgement and Attribution Regarding Sources of Content
Some of the initial content on this page may be incorporated in part from copyleft sources in the public domain including wikis such as Wikipedia and AskDrWiki. Drug information for patients came from the The National Library of Medicine. Infectious disease information may have come from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Differential Diagnoses are drawn from clinicians as well as an amalgamation of 3 sources: 1.The Disease Database; 2. Kahan, Scott, Smith, Ellen G. In A Page: Signs and Symptoms. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2004:3; 3. Sailer, Christian, Wasner, Susanne. Differential Diagnosis Pocket. Hermosa Beach, CA: Borm Bruckmeir Publishing LLC, 2002:7 .
