Anthony Trafford James

Anthony Trafford James

Anthony Trafford James (born March 26, 1922 in Cardiff , † December 7, 2006 ) was a British chemist and biochemist who played an important role in the development of gas chromatography .

Life

James's parents moved to London during the economic crisis in 1929, where James attended University College School. At the age of 16, he left school to add to his parents' income and was a laboratory technician for the Kodak Company. At the same time he attended Northern Polytechnic, where he received a bachelor's degree, and in 1940 he received a government scholarship to study at University College London, which was then evacuated to Wales (Aberystwyth). In 1943 he received a bachelor's degree with top marks and then worked on his dissertation with Christopher Kelk Ingold and ED Hughes. At the same time he was very active politically, became a member of the Communist Party and was President of the National Union of Students. At times he even considered becoming a politician. After graduation he was at Bedford College, where he worked on antimalarial drugs, and in 1947 at the Lister Institute, where he worked under Richard Synge with gas chromatography and met Archer Martin , with whom he became friends and worked. He went with Martin (who received the Nobel Prize in 1952 for his work in chromatography with Synge) at the National Institute of Medical Research in Mill Hill.

There he and Martin succeeded in developing gas-liquid chromatography (GLC), published in 1952 in the Biochemical Journal. The further refinement of the method, often in cooperation with industry, aroused James' interest in human nutrition and vegetable fats. With James E. Lovelock , he studied the role of fats in heart disease. In 1962 he moved to the Unilever research laboratories in Colworth House, which he had previously advised. Here he led his own research group for fat biosynthesis. In particular, he investigated the metabolism of vegetable fats and how double bonds are incorporated into the fatty acid chains. In the late 1960s, the company sent him to Harvard Business School and he took on senior management roles in the laboratory. In 1985 he retired from Unilever. For several years he was the Non-Executive Director of the Wellcome Foundation.

He was Professor of Industrial Chemistry at Loughborough University and also wrote a textbook on the biochemistry of fats. For several years he chaired the International Conferences for the Biochemistry of Fats and was also active in state research funding. In particular, he advocated the lifting of barriers between the Medical Research Council and the Agricultural Research Council and expanded the latter to become the Agricultural and Food Research Council.

In 1978 he became a CBE and in 1983 a Fellow of the Royal Society .

In 1945 he married Olga Clayton, with whom he had three children. After her death in 1983 he married Linda Beare, with whom he had a son. Most recently he suffered from Parkinson's disease.

Fonts

• with AJP Martin: Gas-liquid partition chromatography: the separation and micro-estimation of volatile fatty acids from formic acid to dodecanoic acid, Biochemical Journal, Volume 50, 1952, pp. 679-690
• with RV Harris: Linoleic and α-linolenic acid biosynthesis in plant leaves and a green alga, Biochemica et Biophysica Acta, Volume 106, 1965, pp. 456-464.
• It seems like only yesterday: development of gas-liquid chromatography, INFORM, Volume 6, 1995. pp. 820-834
• with MI Gurr: Lipid Biochemistry: An Introduction, Chapman and Hall 1971

literature

• Gurr: Anthony Trafford James, Biographical Memoirs Fellows Royal Society, Volume 58, 2012, pp. 129-150

Web links

• MI Gurr, Anthony Trafford James , AOCS Lipid Library, 2014

Individual evidence

1. ↑ James, Martin, Gas-liquid partition chromatography: the separation and micro-estimation of volatile fatty acids from formic acid to dodecanoic acid, Biochemical Journal, Volume 50, 1952, pp. 679-690.