"for his discovery of the growth-stimulating vitamins."
FREDERICK GOWLAND HOPKINS WAS BORN JUNE 20, 1861, IN Eastbourne, in Sussex, England, where he spent the first ten years of his life alone with his widowed mother, attending a dames school from the age of six and playing with his father's microscope from the age of eight or nine. After 1871 they lived in Enfield with his mother's brother, James Gowland. For nearly four years Hopkins attended the City of London School, but despite a good record at first he had ultimately to withdraw because of truancy - "sheer boredom" was his own explanation. He then attended a private school. At seventeen he entered an insurance office, but remained for only six months; he then became an articled pupil to an analytical chemist. Later he attended the Royal School of Mines at South Kensington and worked for a few months as assistant in a private laboratory. A few courses at University College and success in examination for associateship of the Institute of Chemistry brought an invitation from Dr. (later Sir Thomas) Stevenson, Medical Jurist at Guy's Hospital and Home Office expert, to assist in his laboratory. While working there, Hopkins took a degree extramurally from the London University. In 1888 he began to study medicine at Guy's. In 1894 he qualified and obtained the London M.B. He then joined the school staff at Guy's but left in 1898, going to Cambridge at the invitation of Michael Foster to develop teaching and research in physiological chemistry. There he spent the rest of his life, at first with meager facilities, but after 1925 in a well-endowed institute. He was everywhere recognized as facile princeps of English biochemistry, which he established almost singlehanded. His honors included knighthood, in 1925; the Copley Medal, in 1926; the Nobel Prize, in 1929; presidency of the Royal Society, in 1931; and the Order of Merit, in 1935. He retired in 1943 and died in 1947. In addition to his dietary studies, his work on glutathione and tissue oxidation, on muscle chemistry, and on uric acid are very well known.