Ernst Boris Chain

Ernst Boris Chain was a German-born biochemist from a Jewish family in Berlin who fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and later became a British citizen. Working with Howard Florey at Oxford University from 1939, he investigated Alexander Fleming's 1928 observation of the antibacterial mold penicillium, and together they worked out penicillin's chemical properties and developed methods to isolate and concentrate it as a usable therapeutic drug, work for which Chain, Florey and Fleming shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Chain later worked out the beta-lactam structure at the core of the penicillin molecule with Edward Abraham in 1942, a finding later confirmed by x-ray crystallography, and after the war he led the biochemistry department at Imperial College London, where he worked on fermentation technology until his retirement.