The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07.
Chain, Ernst Boris
1906–79, English biochemist, b. Berlin, Germany. In 1933 he left Germany and went to England, where he conducted research at Cambridge from 1933 to 1935 and at Oxford from 1935; he lectured (1936–48) in chemical pathology at Oxford. In 1951 he became director of the International Research Center for Chemical Microbiology, Istituto Superiore de Sanità, Rome. He was professor of biochemistry at the Univ. of London from 1961. For his work on penicillin, Chain shared with Sir Alexander Fleming and Sir Howard Florey the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
