Liverpool: the early years of biochemistry.

The first Chair and department of biochemistry in the U.K. were founded at the University of Liverpool in 1902, thanks to a generous donation by William Johnston, a Liverpool shipowner. The first holder of the Johnston Chair, Benjamin Moore, was a dynamic man, who set up an active research centre. In 1906, he and Edward Whitley founded The Bio-Chemical Journal as a private venture, and in 1912, they sold it to the Biochemical Society. Moore also initiated the first Honours School of Biochemistry in the country before moving to London in 1914 and being succeeded by Walter Ramsden. The development of the department was stopped by World War I, and there was little expansion in the 1920s. After Ramsden's retirement in 1931, the third Johnston Professor, Harold Channon, increased staff numbers, ran a successful research school and re-established the Honours course. World War II brought that to an end, and Channon moved into industry. After the war, biochemistry expanded from a niche subject in a small number of British universities into one that was strongly represented in most universities, but the penetration of biochemistry into wide areas of functional biology has blurred conventional subject boundaries, so in many universities (including the University of Liverpool), departments of biochemistry have been incorporated into large more general schools.

The metabolism of cyanide and the gastrointestinal circulation of the resulting thiocyanate under conditions of chronic cyanide intake in the rat.

A study of the distribution of 14C-labelled cyanide was carried out in rats exposed to a regular intake of cyanide in the diet for 3 weeks. All tissues contained radioactivity 9 h after injection of 14CN- but very high amounts were found in the stomach, which accounted for 18% of the total injected radioactivity. Most of this was in the contents of the stomach, of which over 80% was in the form of thiocyanate. When a small amount of S14CN- was given by mouth to rats with elevated plasma thiocyanate levels, most of the activity was excreted in the urine and only small amounts were found in the faeces. This indicated the existence of a gastrointestinal circulation of thiocyanate, in which a substantial amount of this substance secreted into the stomach contents of the rat was reabsorbed by the intestine into the body fluid to be partly excreted in the urine and partly resecreted into the gastric contents. The likely implications of this are discussed.