Frederick Gowland Hopkins(1861–1947)

Frederick Gowland Hopkins was born at Eastbourne in Sussex on the twentieth of June 1861, the only child of a bookseller who died when he was a year old. His mother moved the family to Enfield to be near her sister, and the boy was educated at the City of London School and as an apprentice analytical chemist in a commercial laboratory in the City. He was twenty-two before he could afford to take an external degree of the University of London in chemistry, paid for from his own analytical practice, and twenty-seven before he could enter Guy's Hospital as a medical student. He qualified as a doctor in 1894 and stayed at Guy's as a teacher of physiological chemistry, the new science that was just beginning to be called biochemistry.

In 1898, on the recommendation of the Cambridge physiologist Sir Michael Foster, Trinity College brought him to Cambridge as a tutor in chemical physiology. He spent the rest of his life there. The work that made his name began in 1900 with the isolation, with his colleague Sydney Cole, of the amino acid tryptophan, and the demonstration in 1906 that an animal cannot live on a diet of pure protein, fat, carbohydrate, water and minerals alone, no matter how carefully balanced, but requires in addition minute quantities of further substances that he called accessory food factors.

The crucial experiments were published in the Journal of Physiology in 1912. Hopkins fed two groups of young rats on artificially purified diets identical in protein, fat, carbohydrate and salts; to one group he added three cubic centimetres of milk a day, to the other none. The milk-fed rats grew normally; the others stopped growing within a fortnight. When he switched the milk supplement between the groups, the failing rats began to grow and the growing rats stopped. The paper, On the Necessity of Accessory Food Factors in Normal Dietaries, was the founding document of vitamin science. It explained the long-puzzling deficiency diseases of scurvy, rickets and beriberi at a stroke, and opened the path along which the individual vitamins would be isolated and characterised over the next thirty years.

He was elected the first Sir William Dunn Professor of Biochemistry at Cambridge in 1914, and built the Dunn Institute of Biochemistry, the building from which most of the great names of British biochemistry of the next generation came. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1929, jointly with Christiaan Eijkman of Utrecht, for the discovery of the vitamins; he served as President of the Royal Society from 1930 to 1935, was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1935, and received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1926.

He died at Cambridge on the sixteenth of May 1947 in his eighty-sixth year. The Hopkins name in modern science carries the weight of the small paper of 1912 that proved a balanced diet of the chemist's measured proportions was not in fact balanced at all, and so opened the field of nutritional science within which the twentieth century would understand the requirements of the human body.