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George H. Hitchings

Born: 18 April 1905

Died: 27 February 1998

Affiliation at the time of the award: Wellcome Research Laboratories, Research Triangle Park,NC, USA

Prize motivation: "for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment"

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Autobiography

My forebears all came from the United Kingdom. On my father's side, they migrated from

London and County Derry in Northern Ireland to Londonderry, New Hampshire. When the

American Revolution came, they, as loyalists, moved on to Canada.M

y father, grandfather andgreat-grandfather were born in St. Andrews, New Brunswick. In 1865, my grandfather, AndrewHitchings, moved his family to Eureka, California. Andrew was a skilled craftsman in the

building of wooden ships, and my father, George Herbert Hitchings, Sr., followed in hisfootsteps, eventually becoming a marine architect and master builder.

On my mother's side, Scottish and English prevailed. The first American was one Thomas

Littlejohn from near Edinburgh, who came to the New World about 1735. His descendants,including Shaws, Eldridges and Thomases, moved about in theMaritime Provinces and New

England. My maternal grandfather and great-grandfather were descendants of theMatthewsfamily that emigrated twenty-four strong from near Glasgow to Prince Edward Island about

1800.M

y grandfather, PeterM

atthews, married Sara Elizabeth Eldridge, and my mother, LillianMatthews, was born inMaine. In 1875, my grandfather moved his family across the United

States. He, too, was a shipbuilder and settled in Eureka.

My mother and father met and were married in Eureka, and my two sisters were born there.About 1897, PeterMatthews established a shipyard in Hoquiam, Washington, to build lumber

carriers for the E.K. Wood Lumber Company. The company built several schooners a year.When PeterMatthews died, my father succeeded to the management, which then became

Hitchings and Joyce. Later, my father was master builder and supervisor in Bellingham,Washington, and Coos Bay, Oregon, and between times he engaged in marine architecture. He

worked in the period between sail and steam and was especially noted for the design of thetransition vessel, the steam schooner, which had a wooden hull and was steam propelled.

I was born in Hoquiam in 1905. Family wanderings put me in grade school in Berkeley and San

Diego, California, as well as in Bellingham and Seattle, Washington. I enjoyed a warm andloving home environment. A high standard of ethics prevailed in our family, together with a

thirst for knowledge and an urge to teach. In their schooling, my mother and father were limitedto what was available in Eureka, but they were avid readers, especially my father. It is clear to

me in retrospect that he would have been a scientist had opportunities been more easilyattainable.

My father died after a prolonged illness when I was twelve years old. The deep impression made

by this event turned my thoughts toward medicine. This objective shaped my selection of coursesin high school and expressed itself when I was salutatorian at my class graduation. I chose the

life of Pasteur as the subject for my oration. The blending of Pasteur's basic research andpractical results remained a goal throughout my career.

My experiences at Franklin High School in Seattle were notable for another reason. We had a

most heterogeneous population, one that blended upper class and minorities including blacks,Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese and first generation Catanians. As a result I lost any self-

consciousness I felt in dealing with people from different cultures and backgrounds.

I entered the University of Washington as a premedical student in 1923. The enthusiasm offaculty and students in the Chemistry Department was very infectious, however, and by the end

of the first year I had become a chemistry major. I earned top grades, election to Phi Beta Kappain my junior year, and a degree cum laude in 1927.

I stayed on to earn a master's degree in 1928 with a thesis based on work carried out during the

summer of 1927 at the Puget Sound Biological Station at Friday Harbor, Washington. Thisinstitution later became a branch of the Oceanographic Laboratories of the University of

Washington, largely created and directed by Thomas C. Thompson, who had been my mentor for

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my master's thesis. Thompson taught analytical chemistry and was notable for the keen wit andhumorous twists that made his teaching memorable. Perhaps the most useful lessons I learned

from him have to do with the mathematics of the precision of measurement.

For further graduate work I was offered fellowships at theMayo Foundation and at Harvard. I

chose Harvard, and after one year as a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Chemistry atCambridge, I was accepted as a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Biological Chemistry atHarvardMedical School. I had intended to work with Otto Folin, but it was his habit to assign

first-year Fellows to Cyrus Fiske for a year. By the end of the year, I was caught up in the Fiske-Subbarow program, and Folin very generously allowed me to continue there. After the discovery

of phosphocreatine, this group had detected and isolated adenosine triphosphate. My assignmentwas to prepare for physiological studies by developing analytic methods (on a scale then viewed

as 'micro' - 1 mg or less) for the purine bases. These methods constituted my dissertation andseveral early publications.