James Norman Davidson

James Norman Davidson , called Norman, (born March 5, 1911 in Edinburgh , † November 11, 1972 in Bearsden near Glasgow ) was a British biochemist.

Davidson was the son of the treasurer of the Carnegie Foundation at Scottish universities. From 1929 he studied chemistry and then medicine in Edinburgh. He completed his studies with a Bachelor (B. Sc.) In Organic Chemistry (1933) and a Bachelor in Medicine (BM) (1937). Then he was in Berlin with Emil Warburg , where he worked on the pure representation of Uricase . In 1938 he became a lecturer in biochemistry at the University of St. Andrews and in 1940 at the University of Aberdeen . In 1946 he became professor at St Thomas' Hospital in London and in 1947 professor at the University of Glasgow .

Davidson demonstrated in the 1940s (1942 to 1944) that RNA is widespread in the human body, thereby refuting the then common view that RNA was only found in plants and DNA only in animals. He detected RNA in the liver, pancreas, brain and other organs and in the brain even in higher concentrations than DNA. He later investigated the biosynthesis and metabolism of nucleic acids using radioactive tracers .

He was CBE , Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh , of which he was President in 1958/59.

He should not be confused with the American biochemist and molecular biologist Norman Davidson .

Works

• The biochemistry of the nucleic acids . Wiley, London 1950.

literature

• Winfried R. Pötsch, Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists . In: Lexicon of important chemists . Harri Deutsch, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-8171-1055-3 .

Web links

• Robert Y Thomson and Moira Rankin, English Biography by Davidson, University of Glasgow 2002