Sir David Hopwood – ‘designer’ of antibiotics
Gabriele Butkute, events and administrative assistant at the Society of Biology, writes about Sir David Hopwood, a scientist featured in the Biology: Changing the World top ten poll. Professor Sir David Hopwood, a British geneticist and microbiologist, carried out fundamental research into the genetics of the soil bacteria Streptomyces, an organism which gives rise to half the world’s antibiotics in use today. Ever since the discovery of penicillin in 1928, antibiotics have been one of the most widely used groups of drugs, and this has led to increasing antibiotic resistance. After graduating in botany from St John’s College, Cambridge in 1954, Hopwood chose to do a PhD in the Botany School at Cambridge in the field of microbial genetics, focusing on a group of soil bacteria called Streptomyces. This group of bacteria were known to be a very promising source of antibiotics as they had already been shown…
