Walter Morgan

Walter Thomas James Morgan (born October 5, 1900 in Ilford , London , † February 10, 2003 in Cheam , London) was a British biochemist, known for the elucidation of the chemical nature of blood group antigens.

Morgan left school at the age of 16 and worked as a technician in a gas works and then as a chemist in the state production of synthetic fuels. During the First World War he was in the Royal Navy and then studied chemistry at the University of London on a state scholarship with a bachelor's degree in 1922.

From 1925 he was at the invitation of the biochemistry professor and Nobel Prize winner Arthur Haden at the Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine, where he stayed for the rest of his professional career and was a permanent member of the institute from 1928. In 1927 he received his doctorate (PhD) from Haden with a thesis on the biochemistry of carbohydrates. From 1929 he was in the immunology department of the institute in Elstree (Herfortshire), where he examined polysaccharide-containing antigens of bacteria and their endotoxins, against which vaccines were developed, and developed new analytical chemical processes. The method he developed with Leslie Elson for measuring the proportions of hexosamines , published in 1933/34, became a standard method . In 1936 he was on a Rockefeller scholarship with Tadeusz Reichstein at the ETH Zurich to further his education in organic chemistry and in the same year acquired a D.Sc. of the University of London.

In 1938 he was back at the Lister Institute, where from 1940 he set up a research group to study blood group antigens. Winifred Watkins also belonged to the group from 1942 , with whom he then worked closely. The complete characterization of the glycoproteins involved dragged on until 1967. Morgan was head of biochemistry at the Lister Institute from 1941 until his retirement in 1968 and from 1951 professor at the University of London, where he had been a reader in biochemistry since 1938 . He remained active as a scientist there even after his retirement and took over the management of the Lister Institute intended for liquidation in 1972 until its closure in 1975. From 1977 to 1989 he worked as a researcher at the MRC Clinical Research Center at Northwick Park Hospital, again in collaboration with Winifred Watkins.

Honors and memberships

• 1949 Fellow of the Royal Society , of which he was a councilor from 1956 to 1958 and of which he was vice-president from 1961 to 1964.
• In 1958 he was plenary speaker at the meeting of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Doctors .
• 1959 Commander of the British Empire (CBE)
• 1959 Croonian Lecture of the Royal Society
• 1965 Conway Evans Prize from the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians
• 1967 Karl Landsteiner Memorial Award from the American Society of Blood Banks with Winifred Watkins
• 1968 Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize .
• 1968 Royal Medal of the Royal Society
• 1990 Phillip Levine Award from the American Society of Clinical Pathologists with Winifred Watkins.

He received honorary doctorates from the University of Michigan (1969) and the University of Basel (1964) and an honorary member of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2000), the Royal College of Physicians , the British Blood Transfusion Society, the Biochemical Society, the International Endotoxin Society and the International Society of Blood Transfusion.

literature

• Obituary in Glycobiology by Winifred Watkins and Harry Schachter
• Obituary in the Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society, Volume 51, 2005, p. 291, by Winifred Watkins and Kenneth D. Bagshawe