Sir Ernst Boris Chain (19 June 1906 – 12 August 1979) was a German-born British biochemist, and a 1945 co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work on penicillin.
Chain was born in Berlin to a Russian father who moved from his birthland to study chemistry abroad, and a German Berliner mother. In 1930, he received his degree in chemistry from Friedrich Wilhelm University. After the Nazis came to power, Chain knew that he...
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Sir Ernst Boris Chain (19 June 1906 – 12 August 1979) was a German-born British biochemist, and a 1945 co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work on penicillin.
Chain was born in Berlin to a Russian father who moved from his birthland to study chemistry abroad, and a German Berliner mother. In 1930, he received his degree in chemistry from Friedrich Wilhelm University. After the Nazis came to power, Chain knew that he, being a Jew, would no longer be safe in Germany. He left Germany in 1933 and moved to England.
He began working on phospholipids at Cambridge University under the direction of Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins. In 1935, he accepted a job at Oxford University as a lecturer in pathology. During this time he worked on a range of research topics, including snake venoms, tumour metabolism, lysozymes, and biochemistry techniques.
In 1939, he joined Howard Florey to investigate natural antibacterial agents produced by microorganisms. This led him and...
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