Arthur Harden
Harden, Arthur (1865-1940) was a British chemist. He shared the 1929 Nobel Prize in chemistry with the German chemist Hans Karl August Simon von Euler-Chelpin for their research on sugar fermentation and enzymes.
Harden was born on Oct. 12, 1865, in Manchester, England. He graduated from Owens College of the University of Manchester in 1885, and he received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Erlangen in Germany in 1888. From 1888 to 1897, he taught at Owens College. Harden married Georgina Bridge in 1900. They had no children.
In 1897, Harden was appointed chemist at the British Institute of Preventive Medicine (now the Lister Institute). In 1907. he became head of the biochemical department, a position he held until he retired from the institute in 1930. Harden and the British chemist F. C. Garrett wrote the textbook Practical Organic Chemistry, published in 1897. Harden in 1898 began studies on the fermentation of sugars by bacteria. Fermentation is a chemical process carried out by microbes, such as bacteria and yeast, that breaks down organic materials.
After 1900, Harden concentrated his research on alcoholic fermentation by yeasts. Yeasts are single-celled organisms that belong to a group called fungi. Yeasts produce chemicals called enzymes, molecules that speed up chemical reactions in living things. Alcoholic fermentation happens when yeast breaks down sugar from grain into alcohol and carbon dioxide gas for use in beer, for example. Advancing the work of German chemist Eduard Buchner, Harden determined the structure of the enzyme zymase, which aids in the fermentation of the sugar glucose. He also showed that inorganic (nonliving) phosphates can increase the speed of fermentation. His work was important in later research in metabolic processes (metabolism is the process by which living things turn food into energy and living tissue).
In 1909, Harden was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. He received the society's Davy Medal in 1935. Harden was knighted in 1936. He was an editor of the Biochemical Journal from 1913 to 1938. He died on June 17, 1940, at Bourne End in the county of Buckinghamshire in England.