BIOGRAPHICAL MEMORANDA 



degradation by any and all organisms that did not obviously effect a 

 direct oxidation of hexoses to hexonic acids. 



Soon after the publication of the paper by Kluyver and Struyk 

 [1926] in which this interpretation was advanced, it was adopted by 

 all the leading investigators of carbohydrate biochemistry. But six 

 years later the hypothesis, then no longer in keeping with newly es- 

 tablished facts, was abandoned, and hexose diphosphate once again 

 assumed the place of prominence it had lost. After another six years 

 Lipmann had begun to perceive the significance of phosphorylation 

 as a means of preserving metabolic energy in the form of 'high energy 

 phosphate bonds'. 



And Meyerhof [1945, 1947] provided a new and more refined 

 explanation of the Harden and Young equation, based upon the lack 

 of a sufficiently high ATP-ase activity of the yeast juice, a result 

 of the fact that in the crude extracts this enzyme is quite labile and 

 that it is strongly adsorbed on the structural elements of the yeast cells, 

 so that only a small proportion of the total ATP-ase content of intact 

 yeast appears in the extracted juice. 



Meanwhile the applicability of the principles developed in the 

 course of 1 924-1 926 was tested for many different types of fermen- 

 tations, and it cannot be denied that they rendered excellent service in 

 helping to account for the butyric acid and butanol-acetone fermen- 

 tations, the fermentations of the coli-aerobacter group of bacteria, the 

 propionic acid fermentation, and the anaerobic processes of denitri- 

 fication and sulphate reduction. 



In fact, these ideas were soon recognized as being of quite funda- 

 mental significance. In consequence Kluyver was invited to deliver a 

 series of lectures before the University of London, and two years later 

 at Iowa State College in the U.S.A. The London lectures, given in 

 ^S ? were published in book form by the University of London 

 Press in 193 1. They contained a simple and highly condensed ac- 

 count of the principles underlying the 'unity in biochemistry'. It is 

 here that for the first time the term 'comparative biochemistry' was 

 launched, with the remark that, though as yet little developed, 'this 

 fine of study . . . may in future win the same significance for biochem- 

 istry as "comparative anatomy" has already long ago attained for 

 anatomy'. 



Here, too, one can find the four equations that represent the various 



94 



