Chemistry and life / by Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins.

  • Frederick Hopkins
Date:
1933
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Chemistry and life / by Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    A Organic chemistry at its birth was closely concerned with the nature of plant and animal products, but its own great and inevitable development, and especially the growth of the great art of synthesis, and the enormous field for investigation of artificial products which this provided, led chemical thought, for two generations at least, away from the problems of what we now know as biochemistry. The attainment of our present knowledge of molecular structure and all that it stands for is surely one of the greatest triumphs of the application of inductive and deductive thought to experimental data. Progress in that knowledge must continue, but it will not be inhibited if the atten- tion of organic chemists is turned once more to natural products in particular. Indeed it is a matter for much satisfaction to realise that the minds of many among the most distinguished of chemists are just now already so orientated. I will only remind you of the brilliant work done in recent years by Will- statter, Robinson, Howarth, Windaus and others. I am to ask you, however, to think less of biological products themselves than of the changes they undergo during life. For sound and ample reasons, organic and physical chemists, when engaged in studies of kinetics, simplify, so far as possible, the conditions of experiment, so that their conclusions may be clear and definite. They are accustomed to deal in the main with relatively simple systems. Is it not well, however, that _ they should bear in mind that chemical systems exist, and have existed ever since living organisms appeared in the world, in which the exact co-ordination in time and space of a multitude of reactions is an essential and indispensible condition? UIti- mately the factors and conditions which maintain a high degree of organisation among large groups of reactions must be as much the field of chemical study as the kinetics of simpler systems. Success in illuminating the problems of complex organisation may well prove in the future to be among the greatest fruits of chemical thought and endeavour. That is why I think all chemists should sometimes turn their thoughts to living organisms. As I have remarked, it is a matter for great satisfaction that distinguished chemists are now engaged upon intensive studies of plant and animal products; but if chemistry is to provide the help that biology so urgently needs it must approach living organisms not as chemical stores but as seats of chemical events! I shall in this Address dwell chiefly on the dynamic side of bio- chemistry. ;
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