Ernst Boris Chain

Origins and early life

Ernst Boris Chain was born in Berlin on 19 June 1906 into a German-Jewish family, the son of Margarete Eisner and of Michael Chain, a chemist and industrialist from Mogilev in the Russian Empire. He graduated in chemistry in Berlin in 1930 and worked three years on enzymes at the Charité, until, being Jewish, he knew he was no longer safe and reached England on 2 April 1933 with ten pounds.

Work and career

After two years at Cambridge under Frederick Gowland Hopkins, he moved in 1935 to the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology in Oxford. In 1939 he and Howard Florey began a systematic study of antibacterial substances made by microbes, which led them to the penicillin Alexander Fleming had described nine years earlier and to its curative action. With Norman Heatley's help the Oxford team learned to isolate and concentrate the drug, and in 1942 Chain and Edward Abraham proposed its beta-lactam structure, which Dorothy Hodgkin confirmed in 1945.

Towards the end of the war he learned that his mother and his sister, who had stayed in Germany, had been murdered in the Holocaust. He shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Fleming and Florey, for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases.

Personal life

In 1948 he married the biochemist Anne Beloff, with whom he had two sons and a daughter, and went to Rome to direct a centre for chemical microbiology at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità. He joined the board of governors of the Weizmann Institute in 1954, raised his children within the Jewish faith, and in 1965 set out his convictions in a speech called Why I am a Jew.

Later years

Appointed professor at Imperial College London in 1961, he returned from Rome in 1964 to build its biochemistry department, was knighted in 1969, settled at Mulranny in County Mayo in 1970, and died at Castlebar on 12 August 1979.