- Person
- Ernst Chain
- Lived
- 1906–1979
- Field
- Biochemistry
- From
- German-British
The story
Alexander Fleming had described penicillin, a substance produced by a mould, about a decade before the Oxford work began, but he could not isolate it, and most scientists saw it as an unstable laboratory curiosity. In 1936 Howard Florey became director of the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford and began building an interdisciplinary team. One of his first hires was Ernst Chain, a Jewish biochemist who had fled Berlin in 1933, recommended by Frederick Gowland Hopkins of Cambridge and given the task of developing a biochemical unit.
One of the Dunn School's early projects was lysozyme, an antibacterial enzyme also discovered by Fleming. As that work was ending in 1938, Florey and Chain decided to study the properties of antibacterial substances produced by micro-organisms, among them penicillin. They mistakenly assumed these substances were all enzymes. In 1939 they began a systematic study, with crucial technical help from Norman Heatley.
Chain led the biochemical work. Together with the chemist Edward Abraham, he worked out a technique for purifying and concentrating penicillin. According to the Science History Institute, the keys were controlling the acidity of the mould broth, keeping the sample cold and evaporating it repeatedly, in effect freeze-drying it. At first many gallons of broth yielded only enough to cover a fingernail. Heatley and a succession of other scientists later made the process far more efficient.
The purified product soon proved itself. In March 1940 Chain arranged for two mice to receive a much larger dose than Fleming had ever used, and they survived unharmed. In May 1940 penicillin cured mice of deadly streptococcal infections, and in August Florey and Chain reported their results in The Lancet. Chain and Florey went on to show penicillin's therapeutic action and to study its chemical composition, discovering how to isolate and concentrate the germ-killing agent in the Penicillium mould.
The work earned Chain a share of the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Florey and Fleming. Purification was the step that turned penicillin from a curiosity into a medicine: without a concentrated, reliable drug there could have been no clinical trials and no mass production. The techniques developed in Oxford laid the groundwork for the antibiotic industry that has since saved many millions of lives.
Why it matters
Chain's purification work turned penicillin from a curiosity into a medicine, opening the age of antibiotics that has saved many millions of lives.
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 founded biochemistry at Imperial CollegeAfter building a research centre in Rome, Ernst Chain returned to Britain in 1964 to found Imperial College London's biochemistry department, specialising in fermentation technology.
- 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.
Sources
- Howard Walter Florey and Ernst Boris Chain Science History Institute
- Ernst Boris Chain Wikipedia
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