3. Hopkins's Protégé

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Early Women Biochemists >> Marjory Stephenson 3 Frederick Gowland Hopkins, c. 1943. Cambridge University Archives, Biochemistry Department Photograph Albums. Hopkins’s protégé A characterful portrait of Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1861-1947), taken towards the end of his life in c. 1943. It was Hopkins who mentored Stephenson at a critical period in her career after 1919. From 1919, Stephenson worked on vitamins and nutrition with Hopkins at Cambridge. It was on his advice that she switched to bacterial metabolism. According to the historian Robert Kohler, this fitted with Hopkins’s grand schema for ‘general biochemistry’ and provided a ready-made niche for Stephenson to ‘push beyond the limits of the biochemical tradition’. Equally, Kohler has also suggests that ‘the substance that Stephenson gave to the new field... was distinctly her own’.1 The acknowledgements to Stephenson’s Bacterial Metabolism (1930) recorded her debt of gratitude to Hopkins, at whose suggestion, she claimed, ‘the book was written and to whose influence alone I owe the incentive to think on biochemical matters’.2 Stephenson’s biographers, however, have also noted that she was an energetic independent investigator, who according to Robertson ‘took her fair share in the hard work of the subject’.3 By the 1940s, any deference Stephenson felt for Hopkins appears to have transmuted into a mutual respect. Her obituarist, D.D. Woods noted in 1950 that whilst her admiration for ‘Hoppy’ remained undiminished, she had become a ‘great standby to Hopkins in the running of his department, in which she had by then become a leading personality’.4 1 Robert Kohler, ‘Innovation in Normal Science: Bacterial Physiology’, Isis 76 (1985), pp. 166-167. 2 Marlene F. Rayner-Canham and Geoffrey Rayner-Canham, Chemistry was their Life: Pioneering British Women Chemists, 1880-1949 (London: Imperial College Press, 2008), p. 322. 3 Muriel Robertson, ‘Marjory Stephenson, 1885-1948’, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 6 (1949), p. 574. 4 D.D. Woods, ‘Obituary Notice: Marjory Stephenson (1885-1948)’, Biochemical Journal 46 (1950), p. 377..

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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN MOLECULAR SCIENCE HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY Soňa Štrbáňová Holding Hands with Bacteria The Life and Work of Marjory Stephenson 123 SpringerBriefs in Molecular Science History of Chemistry Series editor Seth C. Rasmussen, Fargo, North Dakota, USA More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10127 Soňa Štrbáňová Holding Hands with Bacteria The Life and Work of Marjory Stephenson 1 3 Soňa Štrbáňová Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Prague Czech Republic ISSN 2191-5407 ISSN 2191-5415 (electronic) SpringerBriefs in Molecular Science ISSN 2212-991X SpringerBriefs in History of Chemistry ISBN 978-3-662-49734-0 ISBN 978-3-662-49736-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-662-49736-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016934952 © The Author(s) 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
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