| Physician,
born in London, England, UK. He studied at Oxford, where he went on to
hold a chair of medicine (1920--7). His classical study of four inherited
human metabolic diseases, described in his Inborn Errors of Metabolism
(1909), was far ahead of its time: he both showed that Mendelian genetics
applied to humans, and correctly proposed a connection between an altered
gene (a mutation) and a blocked metabolic pathway causing a specific disease.
This concept, basic to biochemical genetics, was strangely neglected for
30 years. |