Herbert (Freddie) Gutfreund. 21 October 1921—21 March 2021

Abstract

Herbert (Freddie) Gutfreund (hereafter called Freddie) made fundamental contributions to molecular enzymology—a name he introduced into the UK Biochemical Society as its first subgroup and as a discipline within the field of biochemistry. Freddie was born in Austria but moved to the UK in 1938, aged 17, during the upheavals across Europe leading up to World War II. He initially worked as a farm hand before his motivation in science took him first to the University of Liverpool, then Imperial College London as a Research Assistant, and on to Cambridge University. His experiences in Cambridge and the friends he made there during the foundation of modern molecular biology in the 1950s remained a major influence throughout his later career. He spent a short period at the National Dairying Research Institute near Reading, followed by the major part of his career at Bristol University, where he founded the Molecular Enzymology Laboratory within the Department of Biochemistry. He developed and encouraged a school of physical biochemistry built especially around the field of transient kinetics of enzyme-catalysed reactions. Freddie will probably be remembered most for the impact he made in his journal publications and through his four books, written over more than four decades, each around some aspect of molecular enzymology.