Sir Ernst Boris Chain (June 19, 1906 - August 12, 1979) was a German-born British biochemist, and a 1945 co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work on penicillin.

External links

• A biography at Nobel Museum site

Ernst Boris Chain was born on June 19, 1906, in Berlin. He attended the Friedrich-Wilhelm University, Berlin, where he graduated in chemistry in 1930. After graduation he worked for three years at the Charité Hospital, Berlin, on enzyme research. In 1933, after the access to power of the Nazi regime in Germany, he immigrated to England. Here, his first two years were spent working on phospholipids at the School of Biochemistry, Cambridge, under the direction of Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins. In 1935 he was invited to Oxford University where he worked in the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, becoming, in 1936, demonstrator and lecturer in chemical pathology. His research has covered a wide range of topics in addition to those already detailed. From 1935 to 1939 he worked on snake venoms, tumour metabolism, the mechanism of lysozyme action and the invention and development of methods for biochemical microanalysis. In 1939 he began, with H. W. (now Sir Howard) Florey, a systematic study of antibacterial substances produced by micro-organisms. This led to his best known work, the reinvestigation of penicillin, which had been described by Sir Alexander Fleming nine years earlier, and to the discovery of its chemotherapeutic action. Later he worked on the isolation and elucidation of the chemical structure of penicillin and other natural antibiotics. Professor Chain is author or co-author of many scientific papers and contributor to important monographs on penicillin and antibiotics. He has won many awards, including the Nobel-prize. Copyright © 2005 The Nobel Foundation http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1945/chain-bio.html