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In memoriam: Herbert Gutfreund

Herbert “Freddie” Gutfreund, an emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Bristol, died March 21 at age 99.

Herbert Gutfreund

Born Oct. 21, 1921, in Vienna, Gutfreund moved to England after the 1938 Nazi invasion of Austria. As part of a British YMCA agricultural training program, he worked for three years as a dairyman, then took a position as a lab technician at the University of Liverpool, where he published his first scientific paper.  He earned his Ph.D in biophysics at Cambridge University and remained there for 13 years, working in several departments alongside such distinguished researchers as Fred Sanger, Peter Mitchell, James Watson and Francis Crick.

Gutfreund left Cambridge in 1956 to take a position as a research scientist at the National Institute for Dairying Research in Shinfield, Berkshire, where he continued work he started at Cambridge on the kinetics and dynamics of protein reactions.  In 1965, he was invited to join the newly established biochemistry department at Bristol. There he established the Molecular Enzymology Unit and remained until his retirement in 1986.

The application of rapid reaction techniques to biological systems was the cornerstone of Gutfreund’s research career, along with his interest in biothermodynamics. With a collaborator, Tom Barman, he pioneered the application of the quenched-flow technique to identify short-lived intermediates in enzyme reactions that did not have an optical signal. He studied the mechanisms of proteolytic enzymes, including chymotrypsin and trypsin. He opposed the notion of metabolite channeling in glycolysis.

Gutfreund wrote several textbooks on enzyme catalysis. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1981.

Stephen Halford, a Bristol colleague, wrote in that one of Gutfreund’s favorite aphorisms was “If you buy a machine, you can do the same experiment as everyone else, but if you build your own machine, you can do an experiment that no one else can.”