Walter N. Haworth | Biography

Walter Norman Haworth was born in Chorley, Lancashire, England, on March 19, 1883. He was the fourth child and second son of Thomas and Hannah Haworth. After high school, and some time spent working in a linoleum factory owned by his father, Haworth entered the University of Manchester in 1903. There he studied chemistry under the department chairperson, William Perkin, Jr., and became particularly interested in Perkin's own specialty, the chemistry of terpenes. Haworth received his degree in 1906, earning first-class honors in chemistry, and then stayed on at Manchester to work as Perkin's assistant.

In 1909 Haworth left Manchester to spend a year at the University of Göttingen studying with future (1910) Nobel Prize winner Otto Wallach, an expert on terpenes. In only one year, Haworth had earned his Ph.D. and was on his way back to Manchester. One year later, he had qualified for his second doctorate, a D.Sc. in organic chemistry. Over the next 15 years, Haworth held posts at three institutions. He was senior demonstrator at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London from 1911 to 1912, lecturer at United College in the University of St. Andrews from 1912 to 1920, and professor of organic chemistry at Armstrong (later King's) College in the University of Durham from 1920 to 1925. In the latter year he was appointed Mason Professor of Chemistry at the University of Birmingham, a post he held until his retirement in 1948.

The most important period for Haworth in his pre-Birmingham days was his tenure at St. Andrews. It was there that he was introduced to the new field of carbohydrate chemistry by Thomas Purdie and James Colquhoun Irvine, two of England's foremost authorities in the field. In the early 1910s, scientists knew a fair amount about the chemical composition of the carbohydrates, but relatively little about their molecular structure. It was to the question of molecular structure that Haworth soon turned his attention at St. Andrews, and before long, he had abandoned his work on terpenes.

World War I interrupted Haworth's new line of research, however. For the duration of the war, the chemical laboratories at St. Andrews (like other such facilities) were completely given over to the manufacture of chemicals with military importance. At the war's conclusion, however, Haworth returned to his work on carbohydrates. The first stages of that research were devoted to the monosaccharides, the simplest of the carbohydrates. Haworth developed a method by which he could determine the sequence of linkages within a molecule and was able to elucidate the detailed formulas for many compounds. Among the most important of these was glucose, which Haworth showed in 1926 to exist as a six-membered ring consisting of five carbon atoms and one oxygen atom. The convention he used to represent the glucose structure, showing the three-dimensional orientation of its components, has since become known as a Haworth formula or Haworth projection.

In his later work at Birmingham, Haworth took on more and more complex structures, eventually finding formulas for lactose and sucrose, two important disaccharides. He also took on yet another challenge--the determination of the structure for hexuronic acid. Hexuronic acid had been discovered in 1932 by Albert Szent-Györgyi in extracts taken from the adrenal gland, in cabbages, and in oranges. Szent-Györgyi suspected that his hexuronic acid might be identical to vitamin C, the antiscurvy agent, that had also been discovered recently.

In his own research, Haworth was able to elucidate the structure of this compound and then to synthesize it in his laboratory. That accomplishment was historic since it was the first time that a vitamin had been produced synthetically. Because of the compound's antiscurvy properties, Haworth suggested that it be renamed ascorbic acid ("not-scurvy" acid), a name by which it is now universally known. For his work both with carbohydrates and with vitamin C, Haworth was awarded a share of the 1937 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Paul Karrer.

Haworth's health failed him in 1938, but three years later he had recovered sufficiently to return to his research and other commitments. Included among those other commitments were a number of political and professional responsibilities. He served as chairperson of the British Chemical Panel for Atomic Energy during World War II. He also became dean of the faculty at Birmingham from 1943 to 1946 and served as president of the British Chemical Society from 1944 to 1946. At the same time, he continued an active program of research, concentrating on the most complex of all carbohydrates, the polysaccharides.

Haworth was married to Violet Chilton Dobbie in 1922. The couple had two sons. Haworth died at his home in Birmingham of a heart attack on March 19, 1950, his birthday. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he had been awarded the Longstaff Medal of the British Chemical Society in 1933, the Davy Medal in 1934, and the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1942. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1928 and was knighted in 1948.