Thomas ap Rees | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 19, 1930 |
| Died | October 3, 1996 (aged 65) |
| Alma mater | University of Oxford (DPhil) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Biochemistry [1] |
| Institutions | |
| Thesis | The Effect of fungal infection upon the respoiratory metabolism of plant tissues (1957) |
| Doctoral advisor | Jack Harley [2] |
Thomas ap Rees (19 October 1930 – 3 October 1996) was a botanist. He was Professor of Botany in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge between 1991 and 1996 [3] when he has killed in a road accident whilst cycling home. [4]
He was born in Frome, Somerset and attended Llandovery College, Dyfed and served two years military service in the Royal Corps of Signals before studying botany at Lincoln College, Oxford gaining a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1957 for research supervised by Jack Harley. [2]
He lived in Sydney, Australia for a number of years as a lecturer in botany at the University of Sydney and in 1961 he was appointed as Senior Research Officer of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. He returned to Britain in 1964 on being appointed a lecturer at the University of Cambridge. [4]
Ap Rees' contribution to plant biochemistry was substantial. [1] He published over 100 research papers and more than 20 reviews during his career. [4] Over 170 scientists attended a meeting held after his death in honour of him and his work. His main area of research was in the regulation and control of plant metabolism. He argued that sucrose played a central role in plant metabolism. Much of his research was on non-crop species as he believed that there may be metabolic features present in these that could be bred into crop plants. Fellow scientists admired him for his sound approach to research. [5]
Sir Hans Adolf Krebs, FRS was a German-born British biologist, physician and biochemist. He was a pioneer scientist in the study of cellular respiration, a biochemical process in living cells that extracts energy from food and oxygen and makes it available to drive the processes of life. He is best known for his discoveries of two important sequences of chemical reactions that take place in the cells of nearly all organisms, including humans, other than anaerobic microorganisms, namely the citric acid cycle and the urea cycle. The former, often eponymously known as the "Krebs cycle", is the sequence of metabolic reactions that allows cells of oxygen-respiring organisms to obtain far more ATP from the food they consume than anaerobic processes such as glycolysis can supply; and its discovery earned Krebs a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1953. With Hans Kornberg, he also discovered the glyoxylate cycle, a slight variation of the citric acid cycle found in plants, bacteria, protists, and fungi.
Sir George Charles Radda is a Hungarian - British chemist. In 1957, he attended Merton College, Oxford, to study chemistry, having set aside an earlier interest in literary criticism. His early work was concerned with the development and use of fluorescent probes for the study of structure and function of membranes and enzymes. He became interested in using spectroscopic methods including nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to study complex biological material. In 1974, his research paper was the first to introduce the use of NMR to study tissue metabolites. In 1981, he and his colleagues published the first scientific report on the clinical application of his work. This resulted in the installation of a magnet large enough to accommodate the whole human body for NMR investigations in 1983 at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.
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