KLUYVER'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO 

 MICROBIOLOGY AND BIOCHEMISTRY 



'When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep 



thought; beauty, he said, is "unity in variety". Science is nothing else 



than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature - or more 



exactly, in the variety of our experience.' 



(J. Bronowski). 



INTRODUCTION 



The profound and inspiring analysis of the meaning of science from 

 which the above passage has been quoted would have been readily 

 subscribed to by Kluyver, whose scientific contributions offer a notable 

 example of a perpetual search in that very sense. How successful this 

 search has been is strikingly apparent from a comparison of the sta- 

 tus of biochemical understanding in 1922, when Kluyver entered upon 

 his career as a microbiologist, with that of to-day. 



In the second of a series of lectures delivered at Harvard University 

 in 1 954, Kluyver, after having reviewed the current ideas on biochem- 

 ical reaction mechanisms, could state with full justification: 



'In concluding I should like to give my opinion that, mainly owing 

 to its impressive metabolic diversity, the microbe has made a major 

 contribution to our general insight into the essence of metabolism. 

 There can be no doubt that studies on microbial metabolism have 

 directly fertilized similar studies on animal metabolism in many ways' 

 [Kluyver and Van Niel, 1956, p. 72]. 



Nor can there be any doubt that the chief impetus to this develop- 

 ment in our understanding of the essence of metabolism has been 

 the enunciation of the concepts of the 'unity in biochemistry' and 

 'comparative biochemistry', both of them based upon the principle 

 of hydrogen transfer as the common and fundamental feature of all 

 metabolic processes. And it is hardly necessary to mention that these 

 are the most far-reaching among the many contributions that science 

 owes to A. J. Kluyver, even though his pertinent publications are but 



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