Ernst Boris Chain
1906-1979
German Biochemist
In 1945 Ernst Boris Chain shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for 1945 with Alexander Fleming and Howard Walter Florey "for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases." Fleming had discovered the antibacterial action of the penicillium mold in 1928, but Chain and Floreyrecognized its therapeutic powers in 1940 and went on to isolate and purify penicillin. Although Fleming noted that his crude penicillin preparation was nontoxic when injected into mice, he did not carry out experiments to determine whether it would actually cure mice that had been infected with a virulent bacterium, such as streptococcus.
Chain, the son of Michael Chain, a chemist and industrialist, was born in Berlin. Chain became interested in chemistry while he was a student at the Luisengymnasium in Berlin. Both his teachers and his visits to his father's workplace stimulated his interest in chemistry and biochemistry. He graduated from the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in 1930 and spent the next three years carrying out research on enzymes at the Charité Hospital in Berlin. In 1933, when the Nazi regime assumed power in Germany, he immigrated to England. (Unfortunately, his mother and sister were not able to follow him and both died in concentration camps.) He worked on phospholipids at the School of Biochemistry at Cambridge University under the direction of Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins for two years before transferring to Oxford University in 1935. Here, he worked as a demonstrator and lecturer in chemical pathology at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology. In 1948 he was appointed the scientific director of the International Research Center for Chemical Microbiology at the Superior Institute of Health (Istituto Superiore di Sanità) in Rome. In 1961 he became a professor of biochemistry at Imperial College in London.
In 1939 Chain and Florey began a systematic study of antibacterial substances produced by microorganisms. This work led to the discovery of the chemotherapeutic action of penicillin. Chain's work was critical to the next stage of this research, the isolation and elucidation of the chemical structure of penicillin and other natural antibiotics. Chain and Florey began their work on penicillin in order to find out whether penicillin preparations contained enzymes that could break down (lyse) bacterial walls. They thought that penicillin might actually be similar to lysozyme, a lytic enzyme that Fleming had discovered before he discovered penicillin. Chain and Florey later said that they had not considered the possibility that penicillin could have practical uses in clinical medicine when they began to work on penicillin. Their research on penicillin began in 1938, before the outbreak of World War II. Although penicillin proved tobe a valuable chemotherapeutic agent for the treatment of infected war wounds and venereal disease, Chain emphasized that only purely scientific curiosity had motivated him to begin studying penicillin.
Ernst Chain. (Library of Congress. Reproduced with permission.)Although he is primarily remembered for his landmark work on penicillin, his research interests were very broad and he made significant contributions to the knowledge of snake venoms, tumor metabolism, the mechanism of lysozyme action, the carbohydrate-amino acid relationship in nervous tissue, the mode of action of insulin, fermentation technology, 6-aminopenicillanic acid and penicillinase-stable penicillins, lysergic acid production in submerged culture, the isolation of new fungal metabolites, and biochemical microanalysis.
Chain was author or co-author of many scientific papers and classic monographs on penicillin and antibiotics. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he received many honorary degrees and awards, including the Silver Berzelius Medal of the Swedish Medical Society, the Pasteur Medal of the Pasteur Institute and the Societé de Chimie Biologique, the Paul Ehrlich Centenary Prize, and the Gold Medal for Therapeutics of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London. He was also a member or fellow of many learned societies in various countries. Chain married Anne Beloff in 1948. They had a longand happy marriage that was productive both in terms of collaborative research in biochemistry and a supportive family life.
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