Neurochemistry and neurochemists.

A presidential address to a learned society or the inaugural address of a professor is usually devoted to one of three possible themes. It can be concerned with political considerations, with a historical survey of some subject, or it can be devoted to a purely scientific problem. We, in our Association, have had in the past two of these themes, the political and the scientific. I am suggesting combining a historical approach with a scientific theme in relation to neurochemistry, and hope to show how in this century progress has been made in this particular field and how there can now be offered applications of the methods, techniques, and theories of the pure neurochemists to clinical medicine and neurology. Therefore the object is rather to show how basic research has frequently been of value at a later date in an understanding of disease processes and subsequently in the treatment of disease. Occasionally this order has had to be reversed and this will also be illustrated. During the first 50 years of this decade there were 59 medical and physiological Nobel prize winners, and of these some 10 were biochemists or used biochemical methods in the field of neurology. Hence one in every six of all these Nobel prize winners was interested in the field which is under discussion, and some of these workers will be mentioned. The chemistry of the nervous system can be said to have begun with Thudichum. He was born in Budingen in Germany in 1828, and died of a cerebral haemorrhage in London in the year 1901. He qualified medically in 1851 at the University of Giessen, but had many other interests, one of which was singing, especially the singing of Italian arias. He was attracted to Lieb:g, thereby making his entry into the field of chemistry. However, like so many others, he had to flee the country of his birth, and, com.ng to England, he married in 1854 Charlotte Dupre, a sister of a chemist at the Westminster Hospital Medical School. He discovered urochrome in