Donald Woods | |
---|---|
Born | 16 February 1912 |
Died | 6 November 1964 52) | (aged
Alma mater | Trinity Hall, Cambridge [1] |
Awards | Fellow of the Royal Society (1952) [1] |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Microbiology |
Institutions | University of Oxford |
Donald Devereux Woods (16 February 1912 - 6 November 1964) was a British microbiologist.
He was born in Ipswich, the son of Walter and Violet Woods, and educated at Northgate School, Ipswich. He entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, graduating in 1933 and gaining a PhD there in 1937. [1]
In 1939 he joined the Medical Research Council Unit for Bacterial Chemistry, working at the Middlesex Hospital, London. After World War II, during which he had been engaged on secret work, he became reader in Microbiology at Oxford University and in 1955 accepted the new Iveagh Chair of Chemical Microbiology there. [1]
Distinguished for work in Bacterial biochemistry; his demonstration (1940) of the antagonistic action of p-aminobenzoic acid against the antibacterial action of sulphonamides allowed him to propose the theory of competitive inhibition of essential metabolites by substances of similar constitution which has received world wide acceptance and has led to important advances in nutrition (folic acid) and design of inhibitory substances. Woods himself in 1940 undertook secret work which deprived him then of the power to follow up his discovery. Since the war however he has developed a school of microbiology in Oxford, actively engaged in folic acid and related studies. [2]
Sir Alexander Fleming was a Scottish physician and microbiologist, best known for discovering the world's first broadly effective antibiotic substance, which he named penicillin. His discovery in 1928 of what was later named benzylpenicillin from the mould Penicillium rubens is described as the "single greatest victory ever achieved over disease." For this discovery, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain.
Selman Abraham Waksman was a Jewish Russian Empire-born American inventor, biochemist and microbiologist whose research into the decomposition of organisms that live in soil enabled the discovery of streptomycin and several other antibiotics. A professor of biochemistry and microbiology at Rutgers University for four decades, he discovered a number of antibiotics, and he introduced procedures that have led to the development of many others. The proceeds earned from the licensing of his patents funded a foundation for microbiological research, which established the Waksman Institute of Microbiology located on the Rutgers University Busch Campus in Piscataway, New Jersey (USA). In 1952, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "ingenious, systematic and successful studies of the soil microbes that led to the discovery of streptomycin." Waksman and his foundation later were sued by Albert Schatz, one of his PhD students and the discoverer of streptomycin, for minimizing Schatz's role in the discovery.
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