Brian S. Hartley

Brian Selby Hartley (born 1926) FRS[2] is a British biochemist. He was Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London from 1974 to 1991.[2][8][3]

For the mathematician Brian Hartley (1939–1994), see Brian Hartley.
Brian Hartley
Born
Brian Selby Hartley

(1926-04-16) 16 April 1926[1]
Alma mater
Awards
Scientific career
ThesisThe chemistry and biochemistry of certain organic phosphorus esters with special reference to the inhibition of chymotrypsin (1952)
Doctoral advisor
Doctoral students
InfluencesRobin Hill[3]
InfluencedSusan S. Taylor[7]
Websiteroyalsociety.org/people/brian-hartley-11577

Education

Hartley was educated at Queens' College, Cambridge graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1947 followed by a Master of Arts degree in 1952.[1] He moved to the University of Leeds where he was awarded a PhD in 1952[9] for research supervised by Malcolm Dixon and Bernard A. Kilby.[4][3]

Career and research

From 1952 to 1964, Hartley pioneered work on the sequence and mechanism of the enzyme chymotrypsin in Cambridge. In 1965, he became a founding member of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), and collaborated with David Mervyn Blow[10][11] in determining the structure and mechanism of chymotrypsin. His group also showed that mammalian serine proteases, including the blood clotting cascade, had homologous structures and mechanisms, indicating a common evolutionary origin.[2]

In 1974, he became Head of the Department of Biochemistry at Imperial College London, converting it into a centre for molecular biology. His group developed techniques for experimental enzyme evolution, and he collaborated again with David Blow, a biophysicist, and chemist Alan Fersht on tRNA synthetases.[2]

However, in 1982, Brian conceived the need for a discipline – biotechnology – to exploit molecular biology breakthroughs. He left the Department of Biochemistry to set up Imperial's Centre for Biotechnology, and became a founding board member of Biogen – the longest surviving genetic engineering company. Since then, Brian has founded companies to make cheap bioethanol from waste hemicellulosic biomass, using genetically engineered compost heap microorganisms.[2]

Awards and honours

Hartley was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1971.[2] His certificate of election reads:

Distinguished for his studies on the structure and mode of action of the proteolytic enzymes. In particular, he has determined the complete amino acid sequence of chymotrypsinogen, a protein of 253 residues, and has studied the relationship of this structure to enzymic activity. He has developed two important new techniques in protein chemistry: the "dansyl" methods for determining sequences in peptides on a very small scale, and the "diagonal" technique for studying the distribution of disulphide bridges in proteins. His comparative studies on other pancreatic proteolytic enzymes have revealed interesting homologies, which give information about the biological origin of the proteins and their mode of action.[2] His earlier kinetic studies on chymotrypsin demonstrated the formation of an acyl enzyme as an intermediate in the hydrolysis reaction.[12]

References
  1. "HARTLEY, Prof. Brian Selby". Who's Who. ukwhoswho.com. 2015 (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. (subscription or UK public library membership required) (subscription required)
  2. "Professor Brian Hartley FRS". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 24 November 2015. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
    "All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." --"Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 25 September 2015. Retrieved 9 March 2016.CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  3. Hartley, Brian (2004). "The First Floor, Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge (1952–58)". IUBMB Life. 56 (7): 437–439. doi:10.1080/15216540412331318974. ISSN 1521-6543. PMID 15545222. S2CID 19975592.
  4. "Chemistry Tree – Brian S. Hartley Family Tree". academictree.org. Archived from the original on 30 December 2015.
  5. Rajewsky, K. (2014). "Michael S. Neuberger 1953-2013". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 111 (8): 2862–3. Bibcode:2014PNAS..111.2862R. doi:10.1073/pnas.1401334111. PMC 3939883. PMID 24532658.
  6. Neuberger, Michael Samuel (1978). Transducing phages for analysis of gene duplications (PhD thesis). University of London. OCLC 500526968.
  7. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 25 September 2019. Retrieved 30 June 2019.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  8. Brian S. Hartley's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  9. Hartley, Brian Selby (1978). Transducing phages for analysis of gene duplications (PhD thesis). University of London. OCLC 500526968.
  10. Blow, David M.; Birktoft, J. J.; Hartley, Brian S. (1969). "Role of a Buried Acid Group in the Mechanism of Action of Chymotrypsin". Nature. 221 (5178): 337–340. Bibcode:1969Natur.221..337B. doi:10.1038/221337a0. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 5764436. S2CID 4214520.
  11. Henderson, R.; Franks, N. P. (2009). "David Mervyn Blow. 27 June 1931 -- 8 June 2004". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 55: 13–35. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2008.0022. S2CID 56616438.
  12. "Certificate of election EC/1971/10: EC/1971/10". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 11 August 2014.


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