The making of a biochemist. II: The construction of Frederick Gowland Hopkins' reputation.

In our previous paper we showed that the British biochemist Frederick Gowland Hopkins promoted "dynamic biochemistry" as the fundamental science of life in a strikingly persistent way until the end of his career.1 We also presented Hopkins' construction of dynamic biochemistry as a long-term process, in which new lines of research gave new substance to his vision of dynamic biochemistry, which, in turn, motivated new lines of research, and so on. In this paper, we ask why neither the process of the construction of dynamic biochemistry nor Hopkins' persistence in promoting it are prominent features of existing accounts of Hopkins; we also consider the origins of the tensions between and within these accounts. We begin by considering how Hopkins' contemporaries viewed him, what they considered his strengths and weaknesses, his achievements and failures. In the first section of the paper we show how Hopkins became renowned as a brilliant scientist, not for his work in dynamic biochemistry, but for a relatively minor sideline of his research which came to assume great significance: the discovery of vitamins. We also show how those of Hopkins' friends and colleagues who considered him to be a poor administrator tried to relieve him of his administrative duties. We examine the construction of these images of Hopkins in relation to the uses to which they were put by the people under discussion. In other words, we aim to show to what extent people constructed, or attempted to construct, a particular image of Hopkins to serve their own ends. In some instances Hopkins himself chose to contest the reputations that were ascribed to him; in other cases he encouraged the dissemination of images of his work which, while they did not accord with his personal priorities, none the less served his interests. We shall discuss both Hopkins' resistance to and collusion with the ways in which he was viewed during his lifetime. In the second section of the paper we show how different versions of a "Hopkins tradition" were created in the 1940s by his younger colleagues and by his successors. Some of these traditions drew upon, and perpetuated the reputations ascribed to Hopkins during previous decades; others challenged them. We show the ways in which differing