A chemist’s son in Berlin
Ernst Boris Chain was born in Berlin on June 19, 1906, to Michael Chain and Margarete Eisner. His father was a Russian-Jewish émigré from Mogilev, in what is now Belarus, who had gone abroad to study chemistry and became an industrialist dealing in chemical products; his mother came from a German-Jewish family. Science was the family trade, and Ernst followed his father into it.
Chain studied chemistry and physiology at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, graduating in chemistry in 1930. His interest lay in biochemistry, the chemistry of living things, which was then a young field and which would define his career.
Flight from Nazi Germany
When Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, Chain understood immediately that there was no future for a Jew in German science. He left Berlin for England, arriving on April 2, 1933, with £10 in his pocket. The geneticist J. B. S. Haldane helped him find a temporary post at University College Hospital in London, and soon afterwards he moved to Cambridge to work for a doctorate under Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, the founder of British biochemistry, studying phospholipids at Fitzwilliam College.
His mother and sister stayed behind. Chain was unable to save them, and towards the end of the Second World War he learned that both had been murdered by the Nazis. It was a loss that shadowed the rest of his life.
Oxford and an old discovery
In 1935 Howard Florey, the Australian-born professor of pathology at Oxford’s Sir William Dunn School, recruited Chain to set up a biochemistry section, and he became a lecturer in pathology. He worked on snake venoms, the metabolism of tumours and lysozyme, an antibacterial enzyme that Alexander Fleming had discovered in tears and other body fluids.
While surveying the scientific literature on natural antibacterial substances, Chain and Florey came upon Fleming’s 1929 paper on penicillin, a substance produced by a mould that killed bacteria in a culture dish. Fleming had been unable to purify it and had largely moved on; most scientists regarded it as a laboratory curiosity, unstable and impossible to isolate in useful quantities. In 1939, with war beginning, Florey and Chain decided to investigate it systematically as part of a programme on antibacterial substances made by micro-organisms. Chain became a British subject in April 1939.
Taming penicillin
Chain led the biochemical side of the work. Penicillin was produced by the mould in minute amounts and was easily destroyed, and the challenge was to extract and concentrate it without losing its activity. Working with Edward Abraham, and with the ingenious technical help of Norman Heatley, who devised extraction methods and makeshift equipment, Chain developed techniques for purifying and concentrating it. With so little to spare, the mould was grown in flasks, then in bedpans and specially made ceramic vessels.
In March 1940 Chain had two mice injected with a crude penicillin sample; they survived, showing that it was not toxic. On May 25, 1940, the decisive experiment followed. Eight mice were infected with lethal doses of streptococci and four of them were given penicillin. Some sixteen and a half hours later the treated mice were alive and the untreated ones were dead. On August 24, 1940, the Oxford team published the results in The Lancet under the title “Penicillin as a Chemotherapeutic Agent.” It was the beginning of the antibiotic age.
From the laboratory to the world
In early 1941 the team tried penicillin on human patients. A policeman with a raging infection improved dramatically but relapsed and died when the tiny supply ran out; as production slowly improved, later patients were treated with growing success. Britain, under bombardment, could not produce the drug on a large scale, so in July 1941 Florey and Heatley travelled to the United States, where government laboratories in Peoria, Illinois, and American drug companies developed mass production. By D-Day in 1944 there was enough penicillin to treat Allied casualties, and after the war it became available to civilians everywhere.
Chain also helped establish what penicillin was. In 1942 he and Abraham proposed that its molecule contained a beta-lactam ring, an unusual and fragile structure; Dorothy Hodgkin’s X-ray crystallography confirmed it in 1945. Understanding the structure opened the way to the many penicillin variants developed later.
Chain argued strongly that penicillin should be patented, as was customary for discoveries in German institutes, so that British research would benefit from the profits. Florey and others thought patenting a medical discovery unethical and refused, and American companies later patented production methods. The decision long rankled with Chain, and his relations with Florey grew increasingly strained.
The Nobel Prize
In 1945 Chain, Florey and Fleming shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases.” Fleming had made the original observation; Florey and Chain had turned it into a medicine. Penicillin has since saved many millions of lives, transforming the treatment of pneumonia, blood poisoning, syphilis, infected wounds and countless other infections, and making possible much of modern surgery.
In 1948 Chain was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in the same year he married Anne Beloff, a biochemist of considerable standing in her own right and a member of a distinguished Anglo-Jewish family. They had three children.
Rome and Imperial College
Frustrated by the lack of facilities in Britain to develop new drugs on an industrial scale, Chain left after the war for Rome, where he took charge of research at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Italy’s national institute of health. There he built a centre for chemical microbiology equipped with a fermentation plant, unusual for an academic laboratory, and worked on the large-scale production of antibiotics and other substances made by micro-organisms. In 1951 he was twice refused a visa to visit the United States under the McCarran Internal Security Act, a Cold War measure.
In 1964 he returned to Britain to found and head the department of biochemistry at Imperial College London, specialising in fermentation technology and the industrial application of biochemistry. He was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 1969.
“Why I am a Jew”
Unlike many refugee scientists of his generation, Chain was openly and proudly Jewish. He was a committed Zionist and a strong supporter of the State of Israel, and in 1954 he joined the board of governors of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, founded by the chemist and first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann. He raised his children within the Jewish faith.
In 1965 he gave an address titled “Why I am a Jew” to the World Jewish Congress’s Conference of Intellectuals, a public statement of a Jewish commitment he never hid. For Chain, whose mother and sister had been murdered for being Jewish, Jewish survival was not an abstraction.
Last years and legacy
In his later years Chain spent time in the west of Ireland, in County Mayo, and it was there that he died, at Mayo General Hospital in Castlebar, on August 12, 1979, aged 73.
Chain’s name is less familiar to the public than Fleming’s, but scientists have long recognised that without the Oxford team penicillin might have remained a forgotten curiosity. His biochemical work made the drug real, his insistence on its structure opened the way to new antibiotics, and his career in Rome and London helped bridge laboratory science and industrial production. Imperial College named its biochemistry building after him, and a road in Castlebar bears his name. The refugee who arrived in England with £10 helped give the world its first great antibiotic.
Sources & further reading
Ernst Boris Chain, Wikipedia · Howard Walter Florey and Ernst Boris Chain, Science History Institute · The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1945, NobelPrize.org · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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