Brian S. Hartley

Brian Selby Hartley (born 1926) FRS is a British biochemist. He was Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London from 1974 to 1991.

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.

From 1952–1964, Hartley pioneered work on the sequence and mechanism of the enzyme chymotrypsin in Cambridge. 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. His group also showed that mammalian serine proteases, including the blood clotting cascade, had homologous structures and mechanisms, indicating a common evolutionary origin.

In 1974, he became Head of the Department of Biochemistry at Imperial College London, converting it into a centre for molecular biology. His group developed techniques for experimental enzyme evolution, and he collaborated again with David Blow, a biophysicist, and chemist Alan Fersht on tRNA synthetases.

However, in 1982, Brian 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, Brian has founded companies to make cheap bioethanol from waste hemicellulosic biomass, using genetically engineered compost heap microorganisms.

Hartley was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1971. His certificate of election reads: