Harold King

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Harold King (born February 24, 1887 in Llanengan , Carnarvonshire , Wales , † February 20, 1956 in Bournemouth ) was a British chemist and pharmacist.

King was the son of a Lancashire teacher couple and was born in Wales, but he was not Welsh. He studied from 1905 at the University of Wales in Bangor (Wales) with a master's degree in chemistry from KJP Orton in 1911. Afterwards, with an 1851 exhibition scholarship as a chemist, he initially worked briefly at a chemical factory at a gas works in Beckton (London) , where he gained experience in analytical chemistry, and six months at the Wellcome Physiology Laboratories in Herne Hill, under the direction of Henry Hallett Dale , and where he became known with AJ Ewins with alkaloid research. From 1912 he was at the Wellcome Chemical Works in Dartford in the laboratory of FL Pyman. From 1914 he was temporarily in the production department, where he was involved in the successful establishment of replacement production for aspirin that was no longer available from Bayer due to World War I. In 1919 he became head of the organic chemistry department at the National Institute for Medical Research of the Medical Research Council in Hampstead , where he again worked under Dale. As an organic chemist, after the First World War he was primarily supposed to find new chemotherapeutic agents based on the example of Paul Ehrlich's Salvarsan . He researched organic arsenic compounds against trypanosomes and anti-malaria agents (without, however, leading to a ready-to-use product). In 1950 he retired.

He was best known for his research on alkaloids and their use as medicines. King succeeded in producing tubocurarine in pure form (a component of curare arrow poison), recognized its isoquinoline character and then systematically looked for the use of simpler components of tubocurarine as a medicinal product (in collaboration with Eleanor Zaimis ). So new muscle relaxants and ganglion blockers were found .

King found the first chemotherapy drug for typhoid , p-sulfamoylbenzamidine.

With Otto Rosenheim (1871–1955) he also made an important contribution to steroid research in 1932, when they recognized that cholesterol and bile acids had a chrysene structure (four benzene rings). In doing so, they corrected traditional structural ideas of the Nobel Prize winners Heinrich Wieland and Adolf Windaus , which had come into doubt due to the X-ray structure examinations carried out by John Desmond Bernal . Wieland and Windaus mistakenly held one of the four rings for cyclopentane (the reason was their adherence to a rule of organic chemistry, the Blanc rule , for which no exceptions were known until then).

He was a Fellow of the Royal Society .

literature

  • Charles R. Harington, Biographical Memoirs Fellows Royal Society, 1956, 171, pdf
  • Winfried R. Pötsch (lead), Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989, p. 235

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pötsch u. a., Lexicon of Eminent Chemists
  2. ↑ Rosenheim, King, Chemistry and Industry, Volume 51, 1932, p. 464, Nature, Volume 130, 1932, p. 315
  3. ↑ Konrad Bloch, The structure of cholesterol and of the bile acids, Trends in Biochem. Sciences Vol. 7, 1982, pp. 334-336
personal data
SURNAME King, Harold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British chemist
DATE OF BIRTH February 24, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Llanengan
DATE OF DEATH February 20, 1956
Place of death at Bournemouth