- Person
- Ernst Chain
- Lived
- 1906–1979
- Field
- Biochemistry
- From
- German-British
The story
After the Second World War Ernst Chain, who had shared the 1945 Nobel Prize for his work on penicillin, was eager to leave Oxford. One source of frustration was industrial: he had urged that penicillin be patented, as was usual at German research institutes, but Howard Florey refused, believing the discovery should benefit everyone.
He found it in Rome. In 1948 he became scientific director of the International Research Centre for Chemical Microbiology at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Italy's national institute of health. There, the Science History Institute notes, he productively combined a biochemical research department with a fermentation pilot plant. In 1957 a consulting relationship with scientists from the British Beecham Group led to the isolation of the core "nucleus" of the penicillin molecule, opening the way to many semisynthetic penicillins. Even as a Nobel laureate he faced obstacles: under the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 he was refused a visa to visit the United States twice in 1951.
His Nobel biography records his appointment as professor of biochemistry at Imperial College London in 1961, and in 1964 he returned to Britain to found and head its new department of biochemistry, where he stayed until his retirement. He insisted that the department include a fermentation pilot plant. It specialised in fermentation technology, the industrial processes used to grow micro-organisms that make antibiotics and other medicines, bridging laboratory science and large-scale production. From 1948 onward his research ranged from the action of insulin to the production of fungal products in submerged culture and the search for new fungal metabolites.
International honours followed his career. He was made a Commander of the French Légion d'honneur and a Grande Ufficiale of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, and he was knighted in the 1969 Birthday Honours. Chain died in 1979 at the Mayo General Hospital in Castlebar, Ireland.
In 2012 Imperial College named its biochemistry building after him, and a road in Castlebar also bears his name. His insistence that biochemical research and fermentation engineering sit side by side reflected the close link between laboratory science and industrial production on which the manufacture of antibiotics and other biological medicines still depends.
Why it matters
Chain helped build the links between biochemistry and industry that allow antibiotics and other biological medicines to be produced at scale.
About Ernst Chain
Berlin-born Jewish refugee biochemist who purified penicillin with Howard Florey at Oxford, turning Fleming’s curiosity into a life-saving drug, and shared the 1945 Nobel Prize.
More about Ernst Chain
- Ernst Chain proposed penicillin's beta-lactam ringIn 1942 Ernst Chain and Edward Abraham proposed that penicillin contains a beta-lactam ring, a structure Dorothy Hodgkin confirmed by X-ray crystallography in 1945.
- Ernst Chain's 1940 Lancet paper electrified medicineOn August 24, 1940, Florey, Chain and their Oxford colleagues reported penicillin's curative power in The Lancet, a paper that electrified researchers around the world.
- Four mice that launched the antibiotic ageOn May 25, 1940, the Oxford team infected eight mice with streptococci and treated four with penicillin. Sixteen and a half hours later only the treated mice were alive.
- Ernst Chain worked out how to purify penicillinAt Oxford, Ernst Chain and Edward Abraham found a way to purify and concentrate penicillin, turning Fleming's fragile mould juice into a usable drug.
Sources
- Ernst Boris Chain Wikipedia
- Howard Walter Florey and Ernst Boris Chain Science History Institute
- Ernst B. Chain: Biographical NobelPrize.org
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