Winifred Watkins

Winifred May Watkins (born August 6, 1924 in Shepherd's Bush, London ; † October 3, 2003 ) was a British biochemist, known for her contribution to the elucidation of the chemical nature of blood group antigens.

Training and activity in teaching

Watkins attended Godolphin and Latymer Girl School in Hammersmith and graduated in the middle of World War II in 1942. Due to the war, she could not study medicine and took a laboratory position at the Lister Institute under the direction of Walter Morgan (1900-2003) as part of a war volunteer service . At the same time she studied chemistry in the evenings at the Chelsea Polytechnic of the University of London with a bachelor's degree in 1947. Before that, however, her first scientific publications appeared in 1944 - as she did not have a degree with special permission from the director of the institute. In 1947 she left the institute to study at the Medical School of St. Bartholomew's Hospital at the University of London, where she received her doctorate in 1950 from the immunochemist Arthur Wormall. She then returned to Morgan in the Lister Institute's blood group research group. In 1960/61 she was on a fellowship from the Wellcome Trust with William Hassid at the University of California, Berkeley . Later she was Professor of Biochemistry at the Medical School of Imperial College (Hammersmith Hospital) and intermittent faculty director.

Research activity

At the Lister Institute (which closed in 1975), Morgan and Watkins began working together for decades during the war to characterize the antigens (which are glycoproteins) responsible for blood groups. At that time, they sometimes used new chemical techniques and took the substances dissolved in the fluid from ovarian cysts as a starting point. In doing so, they pioneered the study of glycoproteins on cell surfaces, which in the 1990s became the subject of intensive research (in addition to their role in immunology) because of their role in cell-cell communication, cancer metastasis and inflammatory processes.

Awards

In 1969 she received the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize with Anne-Marie Staub and Hiroshi Nikaidō (like Morgan a year earlier). She was a Fellow of the Royal Society (1969) and won their Royal Medal in 1988. She received the Franz Oehleckler Medal from the German Society for Transfusion Medicine (1989) and the Phillip Levine Award from the American Society of Chemical Pathologists (1990). She was also a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1988) and the Polish Academy of Sciences (1988). She was an honorary member of the British Blood Transfusion Society and the International Society of Blood Transfusion (1983), Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Honorary Member of the Biochemical Society and the Japanese Biochemical Society, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Pathologists. In 1967 she received the Karl Landsteiner Memorial Award from the American Association of Blood Banks and in 1986 she received the Kenneth Goldsmith Award from the British Blood Transfusion Society. She received honorary doctorates from the University of London (D. Sc. 1963) and the University of Utrecht (1990).

literature

• Obituary in The Biochemist , June 2004, by Robin D. Marshall

Individual evidence

1. ^ Obituary for Morgan