Brian S. Hartley

For the mathematician Brian Hartley (1939–1994), see Brian Hartley.

Brian Hartley
Born	Brian Selby Hartley (1926-04-16) 16 April 1926
Alma mater	University of Cambridge (BA, MA) University of Leeds (PhD)
Thesis	The chemistry and biochemistry of certain organic phosphorus esters with special reference to the inhibition of chymotrypsin (1952)
Doctoral advisor	Bernard A. Kilby Malcolm Dixon
Doctoral students	Michael Neuberger Greg Winter
Influences	Robin Hill
Notable awards	FRS (1971)
Website royalsociety.org/people/brian-hartley-11577

Brian Selby Hartley (born 1926) FRS is a British biochemist. He was Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London from 1974 to 1991.

Education

Hartley was educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1947 followed by a Master of Arts degree in 1952. He moved to the University of Leeds where he was awarded a PhD in 1952 for research supervised by Malcolm Dixon and Bernard A. Kilby.

Career and research

From 1952–1964, Hartley pioneered work on the sequence and mechanism of the enzyme chymotrypsin in Cambridge. In 1965, he became a founding member of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), and collaborated with David Mervyn Blow in determining the structure and mechanism of chymotrypsin. His group also showed that mammalian serine proteases, including the blood clotting cascade, had homologous structures and mechanisms, indicating a common evolutionary origin.

In 1974, he became Head of the Department of Biochemistry at Imperial College London, converting it into a centre for molecular biology. His group developed techniques for experimental enzyme evolution, and he collaborated again with David Blow, a biophysicist, and chemist Alan Fersht on tRNA synthetases.

However, in 1982, Brian conceived the need for a discipline — biotechnology — to exploit molecular biology breakthroughs. He left the Department of Biochemistry to set up Imperial’s Centre for Biotechnology, and became a founding board member of Biogen — the longest surviving genetic engineering company. Since then, Brian has founded companies to make cheap bioethanol from waste hemicellulosic biomass, using genetically engineered compost heap microorganisms.

Awards and honours

Hartley was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1971. His certificate of election reads:

Distinguished for his studies on the structure and mode of action of the proteolytic enzymes. In particular, he has determined the complete amino acid sequence of chymotrypsinogen, a protein of 253 residues, and has studied the relationship of this structure to enzymic activity. He has developed two important new techniques in protein chemistry: the "dansyl" methods for determining sequences in peptides on a very small scale, and the "diagonal" technique for studying the distribution of disulphide bridges in proteins. His comparative studies on other pancreatic proteolytic enzymes have revealed interesting homologies, which give information about the biological origin of the proteins and their mode of action. His earlier kinetic studies on chymotrypsin demonstrated the formation of an acyl enzyme as an intermediate in the hydrolysis reaction.