Brian S. Hartley
Brian Selby Hartley (16 April 1926 - 3 May 2021) FRS was 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 to 1964, Hartley pioneered work on the sequence and mechanism of the enzyme chymotrypsin in  Cambridge, and developed the use of paper chromatography to separate amino acids and peptides — an essential part of protein characterization at that time. 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, as part of extensive work on chymotrypsin and related enzymes. In 1974, Hartley became Head of the Department of Biochemistry at Imperial College London, converting it into a centre for molecular biology. In 1982, he 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, Hartley 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: