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Address of the President Dr E. D. Adrian, O. M., at the Anniversary Meeting, 30 November 1953

1954; Royal Society; Volume: 221; Issue: 1145 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1098/rspa.1954.0012

2053-9169

E. D. Adrian,

Amino Acid Enzymes and Metabolism

The Copley Medal is awarded to Professor Albert Jan Kluyver who has held the chair of microbiology at Delft since 1921 and has become a world authority on general microbiology and the biological approach to its problems. In 1923 he made a survey of natural processes known, to occur through the agency of micro-organisms, and this survey has been the cornerstone of his work for almost twenty years. Impressed by the bewildering variety of substances (both inorganic and organic) used by these organisms for their growth processes and by the equally great variety of substances formed as the end-products of metabolism, he sought some underlying uniformity in the basic types of chemical change which occurred. Devoting himself mainly to bacterial fermentations, he found this uniformity in the extension of the concepts of Wieland and Thunberg that biological oxidations occur by successive transfers of pairs of hydrogen atoms to a suitable acceptor. His views were confirmed by a series of studies covering all the principal bacterial fermentations of carbohydrate. These researches also led him to believe that, in spite of the many and varied products formed, the degradation of carbohydrate took place stepwise by a series of simple reactions leading to a limited number of common intermediates. The initial stages were alike and the variation came later through the differing enzymic constitution of the cells and the differing effects of changes in the environment on such enzyme reactions. These views have been amply confirmed and, apart from its broader implications, the work on fermentation remains a source of some of the most accurate data in the field.