Some Aspects of Lipid Biochemistry

• Published in: Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences Biological sciences, 1962-09, Vol.156 (964), p.376-387
• Main Author: Popjak, G.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Atoms; Biochemistry; Diphosphates; Enzymes; Fatty acids; Lipids; Molecules; Oxidation; Perspectives: Re-assessments of Four Topics which Interested Hopkins; Squalene; Sterols
• ISSN: 0080-4649; 2053-9193
• DOI: 10.1098/rspb.1962.0046

I am at a great disadvantage in comparison to most of the speakers today, for I neither had the good fortune to work in Hopkins’s laboratory, nor did I have the privilege of knowing him. I cannot, therefore, call upon personal recollections of his teaching to link my remarks with his memory. Fortunately the writings of Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins are to biochemists like the Bible; both provide texts for almost all occasions. I will endeavour to show, with some selected examples, how lipid biochemists have carried forward the general concepts of biochemistry developed by him. There are two recurrent themes in almost all his public addresses, expressed with increasing vigour as years went by. One of these was his emphasis on the necessity of a closer association between chemists and biologists; discarding the sterile mysticism of ‘Vitalism’, Hopkins firmly believed that the life-processes of the cell are catalyzed by intracellular enzymes and obey the laws of chemistry. The second theme was his insistence that the seemingly static composition of any living entity was the result of a dynamic equilibrium of a multitude of reactions. As early as 1913, in his address to the British Association, we find both these themes fully expressed. His thesis was ‘that in the study of the intermediate processes of metabolism we have to deal, not with complex substances which elude ordinary chemical methods, but with simple substances undergoing comprehensible reactions’. In the same lecture he described the life of the cell as ‘the expression of a particular dynamic equilibrium which obtains in a polyphasic system’ (Hopkins 1913). Then in his presidential address to the British Association at Leicester in 1933 the two concepts are expressed in a single sentence, when he defined the essential or ultimate aim of biochemistry as ‘an adequate and acceptable description of molecular dynamics in living cells and tissues’ (Hopkins 1933).