Chemistry and life / by Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins.

  • Frederick Hopkins
Date:
1933
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Chemistry and life / by Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    each time he demonstrates a new activity in a living tissue or cell his discovery can only reach its full biological significance when he can see how it is related to the organised activities of the whole system. Ability to do this is of course very limited at present, and can only gradually increase with the increase of knowledge. It is surely because of the necessity for their presence at some nodal point or other in the intricate machinery of chemical organisation in the animal body that such agencies as hormones and vitamins reach their importance... Thinking of the latter, it is a task still ahead to decide how the presence or absence of the fraction of a milligram of a specific substance in the day’s intake of an animal can ultimately determine between life or death. It is, however, satisfying to all interested in biochemistry to realise how rapidly we are just now progressing towards’ a full knowledge of the constitution of vitamins. The same may be said of hormones. Upon this knowledge our ability to deter- mine precisely how these exert their influence in such minute amounts will be based. I have all this time been dealing in the main with facts which apply in particular to the tissues of vertebrate animals. It is clear that a full understanding of the relation between chemistry and life must have a broader basis than this. By the study of invertebrate animals, of the green’plant, of the lower fungi and of micro-organisms in general, we are learning what aspects of the relation are fundamental and essential and what are special. Only so moreover can we learn about the extraordinarily inter- esting chemical modifications which are associated with, and underlie, morphological modifications—the chemistry of species. Lest we should here forget the infinite variety of the processes associated with life I will allow myself, before concluding, a very brief reference to micro-organisms; to bacteria. Ordinary so- called heterotrophic bacteria which cannot dispense with organic carbon compounds in their nutritive medium display many activities in common with animal cells. As you will know, a very large literature deals with studies of their enzyme systems, and with the great variety of reactions which they control; studies which have yielded results of the widest interest. If, however, we would arrive at a due estimate of all the poten- tialities inherent in Life (using the word as we well understand it, though it is so difficult to define with precision), we must, you will agree, remember always the autotrophic bacteria which
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