Ernst Chain

Sir Ernst Boris Chain was a German-born British biochemist whose chemical genius turned penicillin into the wonder drug of the twentieth century. An accomplished concert pianist as well as a brilliant chemist, Chain fled Nazi Germany in 1933 immediately following Adolf Hitler's rise to power, arriving in England with ten pounds in his pocket. He was recruited by Howard Florey to the Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford.

Chain combed through scientific literature and uncovered Alexander Fleming's neglected 1929 paper on Penicillium notatum. Convinced that penicillin was an enzyme, Chain devised ingenious freeze-drying (lyophilization) and solvent extraction methods at low temperatures to isolate and concentrate the unstable, fragile antibiotic compound without destroying its chemical activity. He deduced that penicillin possesses a unique four-membered beta-lactam ring structure. For their monumental work, Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Fleming and Florey. Chain later founded the International Research Centre for Chemical Microbiology in Rome and chaired biochemistry at Imperial College London.