When was frederick gowland hopkins born

In , Hopkins was given a biochemistry readership and 8 years later in and was elected Chair of Biochemistry at Cambridge University in the year He had many outstanding contributions to science but perhaps his greatest contribution was discovering a method for isolating tryptophan as well as identifying its structure. Frederick Gowland and Christiaan Eijkman did the work that was to garner them the Nobel Prize and that was to show the connection between beriberi and eating decorticated rice.

Later on, he did some work with Walter Fletcher where they observed the changes that occurred in muscular contractions upon death. He not only supplied methods for analysis but he also devised a totally new color for lactic acid. In Hopkins began working with Fletcher to investigate the metabolism of muscles and showed the connection between muscle strain, lactic acid production and oxygen supply.

Hopkins is credited with the discovery and characterisation in of glutathione extracted from various animal tissues. At the time he proposed that the compound was a dipeptide of glutamic acid and cysteine. The structure was controversial for many years but in he concluded that it was a tripeptide of glutamic acid, cysteine and glycine. This conclusion agreed with that from the independent work of Edward Calvin Kendall. To use all the functions on Chemie. DE please activate JavaScript. Discovery of vitamins , tryptophan.

Nobel Prize He is notably the father-in-law of the writer J. Although he had no formal doctoral advisor, his equivalent mentor was Thomas Stevenson.

Preceded by The Lord Rutherford of Nelson. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Subscriber sign in You could not be signed in, please check and try again.

Username Please enter your Username. Password Please enter your Password. Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. All rights reserved. In he published two papers describing a new method for determining uric acid in urine, which remained standard practice for many years.

He published papers in and on the relation of uric acid excretion to diet, a reflection of the interest at that time in gout and its relation to uric acid formation. Hopkins had not been long at Cambridge when he produced a piece of classic research that immediately brought him to the forefront of physiological chemists.

While investigating the cause of failure of the Adamkiewicz color test now called the glyoxylic test for proteins, he found that the reaction was due not to acetic acid itself but to glyoxylic acid, an impurity. He then used his analytical skill to discover what substance in protein gave this purple color and consequently isolated the hypothetical amino acid tryptophan from the other amino acids present in protein digests.

Rather than turning to another subject, Hopkins began feeding experiments with mice to ascertain the role of the newly discovered tryptophan in the diet. He found that although the tryptophan did not make the mice grow, it extended their life-span considerably. This experiment, one of the earliest demonstrating the importance of quality of diet, was one of the essential classic tests which brought this aspect of nutrition to the attention of the scientific world.

Hopkins's work on vitamins, summarized in his publication "The Importance of Accessory Food Factors in Normal Dietaries, " is generally regarded as his masterpiece. Although other claimants for the honor exist, there is no doubt that Hopkins was the first to realize the full significance of the experimental facts about vitamins. His work had a far-reaching effect on nutritional research all over the world. World War I interrupted Hopkins's research activities. His next major paper, "An Autoxidisable Constituent of the Cell, " was published in