One of the founding fathers of biochemistry, Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, dedicated much of his long career through the first four decades of the twentieth century to promoting what he called the ‘dynamic side’ of biochemistry: the idea that the basic molecules of life are quite simple and can be analysed by conventional chemical methods – but that they are funnelled down specific pathways, in which one molecule is converted through some small chemical change into another form, again and again, each time fashioned by a catalyst with specific properties. Life, for Hopkins, was the combination
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