Sir Edward Mellanby, G.B.E., K.C.B., M.D., F.R.C.P., F.R.S. (1884-1955) : the man, research worker, and statesman / by B.S. Platt.

  • Platt, B. S. (Benjamin Stanley), 1903-1969.
Date:
[1956?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sir Edward Mellanby, G.B.E., K.C.B., M.D., F.R.C.P., F.R.S. (1884-1955) : the man, research worker, and statesman / by B.S. Platt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    receive into his laboratory a group of research workers who formed a good nucleus for the training of many of the biochemists who now form a significant part of the leaders of this subject in the United Kingdom. By 1925 Hopkins was 64 years of age, but fortunately his Chair was founded before the University rule of retirement at 65, so that he got the opportunity not only of extending his own great investigations but also of building up his well-known school and exerting his inspiring influence on biochemistry until he retired from the chair in 1943. It would be impossible to exaggerate the magnificent part played by Hopkins not only in the development of biochemistry in England but also in setting a standard of investigation which very few can attain or even copy. In 1948 Mellanby delivered before the Chemical Society the Hopkins Memorial Lecture. In it he relates an incident which is an interesting foot¬ note to his appreciation of Hopkins. He said Hopkins had a great stimulating power on young people. A particular instance of this kind happened at an early stage in my undergraduate career at Cambridge, when he introduced to a class taking the Tripos in Physiology a discussion on the volume of blood in the body. He succeeded in rousing in me a state of enthusiasm sufficient to make me confine my whole attention to this problem for a fortnight to the detriment of my other work in order to find a method to decide whether the blood volume was 1/13 or 1/20 of the total body weight. This was an exaggerated reaction of the kind with which I was constantly affected in the few years in which I was intimately associated with him in the laboratory. An Autobiographal Sketch of Research The Editorial Board emphasise the great value of these prefatory chap¬ ters to the younger generation of biochemists and especially of the autobio¬ graphical sketch of the life of the person as student, teacher, and investiga¬ tor. Mellanby, in his Abraham Flexner Lectures which have been published under the title of A Story of Nutritional Research. The Effect of Some Dietary Factors on Bones and the Nervous System, has already given an autobiographi¬ cal account (96) of “a series of investigations which systematically developed from observations made early in his career, observations which played a prominent part in the birth of the science of nutrition and which have con¬ tinued on and off over a period of thirty years/’ The “story” runs to well over 100,000 words with many diagrams and tables; to summarise it would defeat the purpose of the story. Sir Edward intended it to be read through and to be a source of inspiration; as a demonstration of the triumph of determina¬ tion over the difficulties of biological research, it will undoubtedly become a classic in the literature of science. Rickets was, as already mentioned, the subject allotted to Mellanby by the Medical Research Committee in the days immediately before the First World War. The state of knowlege of the disease at that time is indicated by the nature of this assignment, which was to investigate the part that processes of oxidation might play in the aetiology of the disease, and, in the early stages of the experiments which began in 1915, tests were made with diets of high specific dynamic action to see whether increasing the intensity