Leading scientist dies at age of 95
ROSSENDALEBORN Brian Hartley, a Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College, London, died on Monday, May 3, aged 95.
Brian made outstanding contributions to protein chemistry with his invention of new analytical methods and produced for the first time an understanding of the properties of proteolytic enzymes on a structural basis.
He later helped create the area of comparative evolutionary studies, developing genetic models for the evolutionary history of enzyme families to produce ancestor trees.
Brian was born on April 16, 1926 in Rawtenstall. He was educated at Bacup and Rawtenstall Grammar School, and then Queens’ College, Cambridge. He graduated in organic chemistry in 1947. The next two years he spent doing military service in the Navy, and was stationed at the Fleet Air Arm Station, Malta, as a Meteorological Officer. In 1949, he joined Bernard Kilby’s group in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Leeds and was awarded his PhD on ‘The mechanism of action of chymotrypsin’ in 1952.
For postdoctoral studies,
Brian returned to Cambridge, to Malcolm Dixon’s enzyme unit in the University’s Department of Biochemistry.
At the LMB, Brian became a Group Leader in the Protein Chemistry (later PNAC) Division, making several major scientific contributions and inventing new methods in analytical protein chemistry.
Brian published the complete sequence of chymotrypsinogen-A in 1964, a record at the time, as no protein of comparable size had yet been sequenced.
After this, Brian’s interest moved from enzyme function to comparative evolutionary studies, an area he helped create.
Brian left the LMB in 1974, to become Head of Biochemistry at Imperial College London, developing it into a centre for molecular biology. In 1982, seeing the need to exploit breakthroughs in this field, he set up the Imperial Centre for Biotechnology and became its first Director.
He was a founding board member of Biogen, the genetic engineering company, and founded several other similar companies.
Brian was also a champion of young researchers and students.
His group at the LMB hosted many postdoctoral students, several from America and elsewhere. He was a Fellow of Trinity College from 1964 and, as Director of Studies, he organised seminars for undergraduates interested in biochemistry and encouraged them to present papers themselves.
He supervised many successful PhD students, including Peter Rigby, Alan Weeds, Michael Neuberger and the future Nobel laureate, Greg Winter.
He was elected to EMBO in 1971, and in the same year became a Fellow of The Royal Society, ‘for his studies on the structure and mode of action of the proteolytic enzymes.’
Brian met his wife Kathleen at Cambridge University. She was from Northern Ireland and they married in
Belfast Cathedral as soon as he had completed National Service They had four children. Kathleen passed away in 2013. Victoria was disabled from birth and sadly died four years ago.
Friend and Valley historian Peter Fisher described him as a “son of the Rossendale Valley” who “shone brightly in the bioscience world” who in later life turned his attention to family history.
He said: “I had the privilege of being able to stay with and then bring both Brian and his brother Gordon up to Lancashire to stay with us, and acting as guide round The Valley. We were able to meet a group of present-day BRGS students for a discussion of present and past BRGS life.”
● Excerpts taken from obituary first published in MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.