Ralph Ambrose Kekwick

Ralph Ambrose Kekwick (born  November 11, 1908 in Leytonstone , Essex , †  January 17, 2000 in Woodford ) was a British biophysicist . He worked as a reader from 1952 and as a professor at the University of London from 1966 to 1971 , and was particularly concerned with studies of the physico-chemical properties of proteins , with the preparation and analysis of serum and plasma for transfusion medicine applications, and with their extraction of individual plasma components such as fibrinogen and blood coagulation factor VIII for therapeutic purposes. One of his achievements, for which he was accepted into the Royal Society in 1966, among other things , was the development of a process for the production of the first effective factor VIII preparation for the treatment of hemophilia .

Life

Ralph Kekwick was born in Leytonstone in 1908 and studied chemistry at University College London (UCL) from 1925 . He obtained a bachelor's degree three years later and then stayed on as a research fellow at UCL. In the summer of 1931 he went to a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship at the New York University , where he also met his wife. He returned to his home country in September 1933 and got a position as a lecturer at UCL . In 1935/1936 he worked with the Nobel Prize winner The Svedberg at Uppsala University on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation . Here he got to know the techniques of ultracentrifugation and electrophoresis , which shaped his further scientific work.

After the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine in London had acquired an ultracentrifuge, Ralph Kekwick worked for the institute from 1937 with the support of the Medical Research Council . He received a PhD from the University of London in 1941 for his publications on the physico-chemical properties of various proteins . In 1952, Ralph Kekwick was appointed reader for biophysics at the University of London, where he received a full professorship in 1966 . Five years later, at the age of 62, he took early retirement due to his wife's health problems. After his wife died around 18 months later, he remarried in 1974; after the death of his second wife in 1982, he lived alone for the last 17 years of his life. He died in Woodford in January 2000 at the age of 91 .

Scientific work

Ralph Kekwick, who published around 50 scientific publications , initially devoted himself to the investigation of pathologically altered sera and immune sera using ultracentrifugation and electrophoretic techniques and later to the preparation and investigation of serum and blood plasma for transfusion purposes . From 1944 he was concerned with the extraction of individual therapeutically useful components from plasma and the purification of fibrinogen and blood coagulation factor VIII .

As part of this work, he succeeded in producing the first effective factor VIII preparation for the treatment of hemophilia . The method he developed for the extraction of factor VIII was used by the Lister Institute until the 1970s for the production of corresponding drugs. Further of his work concerned the physico-chemical properties of the AB0 antigens and the analysis of proteins in the urine in cases of kidney dysfunction .

Awards

Ralph Kekwick received in 1957 from the Royal College of Pathologists conferred Oliver Memorial Award for his scientific contributions to blood transfusion. In addition, he was admitted to the Royal Society in 1966.

literature

• J. Michael Creeth, Leon Vallet, Winifred M. Watkins: Ralph Ambrose Kekwick November 11, 1908 - January 17, 2000. In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 48/2002. The Royal Society, pp. 233-249, ISSN  0080-4606