Walter Thomas James Morgan

Walter Thomas James Morgan ( born October 5, 1900 in London, London, † 10 February 2003) was a British biochemist, known for elucidating the chemical nature of the blood group antigens.

Morgan left the school at age 16 and worked as a technician in a gas station and then as a chemist in the state's production of synthetic fuels. In World War I he was in the Royal Navy and then studied with a state scholarship chemistry at the University of London with a bachelor's degree in 1922.

From 1925 he was invited by the biochemistry professor and Nobel laureate Arthur Haden at the Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine, where he remained for the rest of his career and established in 1928 hired member of the Institute was. In 1927 he received his doctorate with a thesis on Haden from the biochemistry of carbohydrates (PhD). From 1929 he was in the Department of Immunology of the Institute in Elstree ( Hertfordshire ) where he have been developed polysaccharide - containing antigens of bacteria and their endotoxins against the vaccines, examined and developed new analytical chemical methods. Being developed with Leslie Elson method of measuring the amounts of hexosamines, published 1933/34, has become a standard procedure. In 1936 he was retrain with a Rockefeller Fellowship at Tadeusz Reichstein at the ETH Zurich to log in organic chemistry and earned in the same year a D.Sc. the University of London.

In 1938 he was back at the Lister Institute, where he established a research group to study the blood group antigens from 1940. The group also included from 1942 Winifred Watkins, with whom he later worked closely. The complete characterization of glycoproteins involved lasted until 1967. Morgan was in 1941 until his retirement in 1968 Head of Biochemistry at the Lister Institute and from 1951 professor at the University of London, where he was in biochemistry since 1938 Reader. He remained as a scientist there, even after his retirement and became active in 1972 until its closure in 1975 the management of the scheduled to be settled Lister Institute. From 1977 to 1989, he continued working as a researcher at the MRC Clinical Research Center of the Northwick Park Hospital, again in collaboration with Winifred Watkins.

Honors and Memberships

He was an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan (1969) and the University of Basel (1964) and honorary member of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2000), the Royal College of Physicians, the British Blood Transfusion Society, the Biochemical Society, the International Endotoxin Society and the International Society of Blood Transfusion.