ABSTRACT
Frederick Gowland Hopkins worked for some years in the laboratory of the Government analyst, and played a part, of which he seldom, if ever, talked, in securing the condemnation of a number of poisoners. One day Hopkins was teaching a class of students how to get this and other reactions. The laboratory published a humorous annual, Brighter Biochemistry, to which he contributed regularly. One of his articles, on biochemistry a hundred years hence, perhaps revealed what he really thought. Hopkins never isolated any of the vitamins, though St. Gyrgy prepared one of them, ascorbic acid, in his laboratory; but he had, quite unintentionally, gone a long way to work out the structure of one of them. Hopkins believed that chemical principles could be so applied. His work on diet was guided by the idea that an animal needs certain compounds which it cannot make itself, and that a complete diet contains enough of each of them.
