The making of a biochemist. I: Frederick Gowland Hopkins' Construction of dynamic biochemistry

Abstract

In this two-part study, we present a new perspective on the activities of British biochemist Frederick Gowland Hopkins .The title shared by the two papers -'The Making of a Biochemist'-refers first of all to Hopkins' career and his articulation of a dynamic approach to biochemistry, which Hopkins promoted actively for over twenty-five years.This is the subject of our first paper.The title also refers to the construction of a view of Hopkins by others, including his peers, his younger colleagues, and historians of biochemistry.These constructions, and the extent to which they do and do not accord with Hopkins' own endeavours and intentions, form the subject matter of our second paper, which will appear in the October issue.Historians have thus far focused primarily on Hopkins' role as a discipline builder and on the wide-ranging programme of research and teaching in biochemistry that he set up in Cambridge in the interwar period.1This programme, characterized by its separation from medical concerns and its broad biological scope, has been viewed as the practical expression of Hopkins' prior "vision" of biochemistry.2Here we examine related issues that have not yet received the attention they deserve, namely the relationships between Hopkins' own research and his particular view of biochemistry, and the detailed construction of Hopkins' "dynamic biochemistry" over time.To this end, we follow Hopkins himself, through the laboratory and through the public domain, examining his public pronouncements on the nature and needs of biochemistry and pointing to prominent themes in Hopkins' own research which, we argue, informed his vision of dynamic biochemistry.We outline how that vision then shaped the research done in Hopkins' department, and how, in turn, that research collectively gave new

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.