Who is father of biochemistry

The University acknowledged this in when they created a separate Department of Biochemistry with Hopkins as Chair. The new department flourished under Hopkins. Called to work on troop nutrition during the First World War, Hopkins showed that margarine lacked vitamins A and D and consequently in later years they were added during production.

Hopkins contribution to biochemistry was not just centred on the research in the department but also the teaching in Cambridge. Formal teaching was quickly started with its inclusion into the Natural Sciences Tripos as a subject in its own right. The shear number of his students that were elected to chairs in biochemistry departments at other universities when they graduated illustrates his gift as a teacher and scientist.

Study of nucleic acid is central to the knowledge of life but its fusion with biochemistry started with works of Fredrick Sanger and Har Gobind Khurana. Their experiments involved a subtle bland of enzymology and chemistry that few would have thought possible to combine. The scientists were busy removing the mist that was mitigating the light of knowledge but they still lacked an insight into the cell.

In 's research turned to finding the structural details of cell. When the Sir William Dunn Institute opened in he was given the new Chair founded with it, which he held until retirement Though his journey in science started at the age of 17, he was recognised for his scientific work at When Sir Hopkins joined the physiological laboratory in Cambridge, his first paper was regarding description of crystallization of egg albumin. He showed in his experiments that when mice are fed zein, a maize protein that does not contain tryptophan, the animals stopped growing normally and died soon.

This implicated that tryptophan is essential for growth and survival significantly. He and Fletcher showed that oxygen depletion causes an accumulation of lactic acid in the muscle.

Fifteen years later, Hopkins isolated from living tissue the tripeptide three amino acids linked in sequence glutathione and showed that it is vital to the utilization of oxygen by the cell. Their work paved the way for the later discovery by Archibald Hill and Otto Fritz Meyerhof that a carbohydrate metabolic cycle supplies the energy used for the muscle contraction.

In , Hopkins published the work for which he is best known. In a series of animal feeding experiments he showed that diets consisting of pure proteins, carbohydrates, fats, minerals, and water fail to support animal growth.

He discovered that margarine was inferior to butter because it lacked Vitamins A and D. As a result, vitamin-enriched margarine was introduced in Hopkins also rescued several scientists from Nazi Germany during the inter-war period. The most notable scientist among them was Hans Krebs, who discovered the citric acid cycle at Cambridge in In , Hopkins in association with Morgan and Stewart published an important paper on purine metabolism and oxidation of xanthine and hypoxanthine to uric acid by the enzyme xanthine oxidase found in milk and animal tissues.

Between and , Hopkins was pre-occupied with his duties as President of the Royal Society. In when he returned to the laboratory he focussed on the problems related to the function of thiol groups in enzymes and the role they play in maintaining active substances in the cell in reduced condition.

He employed many women scientists in his laboratories despite the criticism he faced. This was a highly unusual practice at the time as there were virtually no women researchers in any Cambridge department. Claude Bernard is accredited with the Sirehood of Biochemistry.

Neuberg, a German-Jewish pioneer in dynamic biochemistry, gained international recognition through his elucidation of the biochemical reactions of alcoholic fermentation in which he discovered a number of different enzymes such as carboxylase and of intermediates such as fructosephosphate Neuberg ester. Enzymology is generally believed to have been discovered by Buchner in because it indicates that the enzyme can be separated from the broken cells in a dissolved, active state, thereby promoting the separation of the enzyme and further exploration of its physicochemical properties.