[BITList] Began with a beetle

[John Feltham]

Another one for Hugh?



Hopkins, Sir  Frederick Gowland  (1861-1947), biochemist, was born on 20 June 1861 at 16 Marine Parade, Eastbourne, the son of Frederick Hopkins, bookseller, and his wife, Elizabeth Stafford, nee Gowland. From the age of six he went to Grove House School at Eastbourne. Hopkins's father died while he was still an infant, so that he had no memory of him; he was later given his father's telescope and microscope, and his papers relating to his membership of an amateur natural science group.

In 1871 Hopkins and his mother went to live with her mother and brother, James Gowland, a city merchant. He built a house in Enfield where they lived for twenty years. Hopkins attended the City of London School from 1871, but at fourteen he left, to play truant for several weeks, after which he was sent to a private school. On leaving, he spent six months in an insurance office before being articled for three years to a consulting analyst in the City, where he was conscious of learning only something of an analyst's technique and dexterity, although these he may have undervalued. With a small legacy from his paternal grandfather he entered himself at twenty for a course in chemistry at the Royal School of Mines, South Kensington, under Edward Frankland, and then, after a spell of analytical practice with his son, Percy Faraday Frankland, he studied at University College, London, for the associateship of the Institute of Chemistry. His performance in this examination brought him to the notice of Thomas Stevenson, Home Office analyst and lecturer at Guy's Hospital on forensic medicine. Stevenson offered Hopkins a post as his assistant, which he eagerly accepted. During his engagement in this more interesting and responsible analytical work Hopkins began to read for his BSc (London), cramming himself for matriculation and the subsequent examinations by private study, largely on daily journeys between Enfield and Guy's. He graduated in 1890, having in 1888 entered Guy's Hospital as a medical student, being immediately awarded the Gull research studentship. In 1891 he published in Guy's Hospital Reports a method for determining uric acid in urine, which remained standard practice for many years. Meanwhile, the work on uric acid probably drew his attention to the scale pigments in the wings of the Pieridae, a large family of common white and yellow butterflies. Years before, when he was seventeen, he had published in The Entomologist some observations on the purple vapour ejected by the bombardier beetle, which, as he later claimed, had made him already 'a biochemist at heart'. A preliminary note on the pigments of the Pieridae and their suggested relation to uric acid was published in 1889, and the full paper was communicated by E. R. Lankester to the Royal Society and published in their Philosophical Transactions of 1895. Later work, by Dr Heinrich Wieland and others, did not substantiate Hopkins's early suggestions concerning the relation of these pigments to uric acid, but towards the end of his life he returned to the subject.

After medical qualification in 1894 Hopkins became an assistant in the department of physiology at Guy's, making contacts and friendships for life with E. H. Starling, W. M. Bayliss, and others. To make ends meet he undertook a number of other part-time duties, including one which contributed to the formation of the Clinical Research Association. He found time, however, for important researches on halogen derivatives of proteins and on the crystallization of the albumins of blood serum and egg white-the latter published later, after his removal to Cambridge.

This decisive step in his career was taken in 1898 when Michael Foster invited Hopkins to become lecturer at Cambridge on chemical physiology-an aspect of the subject which had then fallen into neglect. In that year, on 14 April, he married Jessie Ann (1869-1956), daughter of the late Edward William Stevens, ship's fitter, of Ramsgate. There were three children: a son who entered the medical profession and two daughters, one of whom was the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes  (1910-1996).

The Cambridge lectureship, however, carried but a meagre stipend for a married man and a prospective father, and Hopkins found it necessary to supplement his income by tutorial work at Emmanuel College, which later expanded into a full tutorship. This was in addition to his primary obligation of setting up a vigorous and inspiring course of advanced study on chemical physiology, and left little time for research. He used this, however, to follow up, in logical succession from an initial chance observation in his practical class, discoveries of the nature of the reagent in the Adamkiewicz colour test for proteins, of the amino acid tryptophane responsible for the reaction, and then of the nature of the amino acids necessary in a mammalian diet for maintenance and growth. Thus he was led to a clear apprehension that a diet containing only purified proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and salts, in whatever proportions and abundance, will not suffice for complete animal nutrition, but that traces, too small to contribute to energy value, of then unknown substances present in natural, fresh foods-now known as vitamins-were also essential. Similar observations made earlier by others had been overlooked and forgotten, and Hopkins's own work on the matter suffered interruption for a year, at a critical period, through a temporary failure of health. It was generally recognized, however, that the paper which he published in 1912 in the Journal of Physiology was of primary importance in giving precision and focus to ideas in this field and to methods of exploring them. The award of a Nobel prize in 1929 jointly to Hopkins and Eijkman of Holland, was widely applauded.

Hopkins's lectureship had been raised to a readership in 1902, but the growing needs of his family had made the tutorial post at Emmanuel College a necessary addition. During his year of illness in 1910, due to overwork, relief from this position came with the offer from Trinity College of a praelectorship, with no formal obligation but his own researches. Hopkins was thus enabled to embark on the studies in which during the rest of his life he endeavoured to unravel successive strands in the skein of intermediary metabolism-the complex of linked chemical reactions, catalysed by intracellular enzymes, which provides the physical and energetic basis for the process of life in general and of cellular respiration in particular.

In 1914 the removal of Cambridge physiology to a fine new building enabled Hopkins, who now became professor of biochemistry, to expand into its former quarters, from the almost incredibly restricted and unsuitable ones to which his work had until then been confined. In later years he gathered a school of younger investigators, who in turn had a far-reaching effect on the development of biochemistry in this country. A much wider opportunity came in 1921 when the trustees of the late Sir William Dunn furnished money for a new institute of biochemistry at Cambridge and the endowment of a chair in that subject, which Hopkins was to hold until 1943.

Except in the one year already mentioned, Hopkins, although small and very light in physique, enjoyed unusually good health for most of his long life. During his last few years, however, he suffered from increasing disabilities, including the loss of eyesight. He continued, however, until it was no longer physically possible, to go to his laboratory and there to pursue his researches with the help of others. If he had been asked to define the central aim of his life's work, he would have named the exploration of the chemistry of intermediary metabolism, and the establishment of biochemistry as a separate discipline concerned with this active chemistry of the life process, and not merely with its fuels and end products. He lived to see the acceptance of this aim by a great army of investigators in all countries, and the identification of the parts played even by many of the vitamins in different cycles of this dynamic biochemistry.

Hopkins was a member of the first Medical Research Committee, appointed in 1913; he was knighted in 1925 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1935. He was elected FRS in 1905, was awarded a royal medal in 1918, the Copley medal in 1926, and was president (1930-35). He was president of the British Association in 1933, and received many honorary degrees, including the DSc of Oxford (1922) and ScD of Cambridge (1933). He died at his home, Saxmeadham, 71 Grange Road, Cambridge, on 16 May 1947.

H. H. Dale, rev. 

Sources  H. H. Dale, Obits. FRS, 6 (1948-9), 115-45 + 'Autobiography', in J. Needham and E. Baldwin, Hopkins and biochemistry (1949), 1-26 + W. J. O'Connor, British physiologists, 1885-1914 (1991), 19-21, 35-41 + J. Needham, 'Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins', Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 17 (1962), 117-62 + The Times (17 May 1947), 7e + The Times (27 May 1947), 7e + The Times (2 June 1947), 7b + M. Dixon and C. Rimington, Nature, 160 (1947), 44-8 + Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 95 (1946-7), 471 + E. Mellanby, 'Hopkins memorial lecture', JCS (1948), 713-22 + b. cert. + m. cert. + d. cert. + CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1948)
Archives Bodl. Oxf., corresp; relating to Society for the Protection of Science and Learning + CUL, corresp. and working papers + Medical Research Council, London, corresp. and papers + Wellcome L., MSS | CAC Cam., corresp. with A. V. Hill FILM BFI NFTVA, documentary footage
Likenesses  G. Henry, oils, 1926, U. Cam., department of biochemistry · E. Kennington, pencil drawing, 1926, Trinity Cam. · W. Stoneman, photograph, 1932, NPG · M. Frampton, portrait, 1938, RS [see illus.] · photogravure photograph, 1938 (after M. Frampton), Wellcome L. · E. Kapp, charcoal drawing, 1943, FM Cam. · E. Kapp, drawing, 1943, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham · J. Palmer Clarke, photograph, Wellcome L. · F. A. Swaine Ltd, photograph, Wellcome L. · photogravure photograph, Wellcome L.
Wealth at death  £14,021 7s. 7d.: probate, 12 April 1948, CGPLA Eng. & Wales