OBITUARY NOTICES.
EGERTON CHARLES GREY (1887-1928).
EGERTON CHARLES GREY was the second son of the late Colonel Arthur Grey. His earlier years were spent in Paris, after which he went to Australia and graduated in the University of Sydney. Here he carried out some experiments on the fatty acids of the human brain. In 1912 he came to England with an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship and commenced at the Lister Institute the work on the chemical action of bacteria which he continued to pursue until his death. He subsequently became a Beit Fellow and a John Foulerton Student of the Royal Society, working for some time at the Pasteur Institute, where he acquired a great admiration for the work of Pasteur, and at the Biochemical Laboratory, Cambridge. During this time he was awarded the degrees of M.A. (Cantab.) and D.Sc. (London) and completed the work for his medical qualification, which he had commenced in Sydney. During the war he served as second lieutenant in the Royal Fusiliers, and was wounded at Gallipoli and invalided from the service. He subsequently entered the Navy and served as Surgeon-sub-lieutenant to H.M.S. Nereide and as interpreter in French and German, taking part in the operations in the Black Sea. After the war Grey was appointed Professor of Chemistry in the University of Cairo, and for his services in this capacity was decorated with the Order of the Nile. His experiences here led him to write a short book, Practical Chemistry by Micro-Methods (Cambridge and London, 1925), in which a method of teaching analytical chemistry with the aid of a minimum amount of apparatus and reagents is described. In 1926 he relinquished his appointment at Cairo and undertook an investigation of the food problems of Japan on behalf of the League of Nations. He spent about six months in Japan and made, single-handed, analyses of all the chief foodstuffs of the country. The results form the subject of a report issued by the League of Nations and are also contained in a series of articles in the Japanese weekly review, The Trans-Pacific (July and August, 1927). He returned to work at Cambridge, where he died after a very short illness on August 10th, 1928. Grey was a man of attractive but unconventional character, full of enthusiasm for his subject. His early death is a great loss both to his friends. and to biochemistry. Grey's experiments on the chemical action of B. coli communis commenced at a time when Penfold had just shown that by cultivation in a medium containing sodium chloroacetate, a strain of this organism could be isolated
Biochem. 1929 xxm
1
2
OBITUARY NOTICES
which did not produce gas from glucose. The nature of the change thus produced in the enzymic armoury of the organism formed his first subject of investigation and led him to the idea that two (or more) independent sets of enzymes were active in this fermentation. He developed this idea by studying the progressive changes during fermentation. By using a large inoculation and by avoiding, as far as possible, the complications due to the growth of the organism he was able to distinguish three characteristic periods. Immediately following inoculation many of the organisms die and the products formed from glucose are mainly alcohol, acetic acid, succinic acid and formic acid. During the next period the production of these ceases, some of them are even decomposed, whilst part of the sugar is synthesised into a non-reducing carbohydrate and another part converted almost wholly into lactic acid. At the same time the surviving organisms begin to multiply. Finally the synthesised carbohydrate is hydrolysed and fermented along with the remaining sugar, both lactic acid and the alcohol group of products being formed. Another series of observations was made on the influence of aerobic or anaerobic cultivation on the subsequent behaviour of the organism to sugar. When. the immediate past history of the organism has been anaerobic, the fermentation under anaerobic conditions yields very little or no lactic acid and much less succinic acid than when its conditions of cultivation have been aerobic. These observations led Grey to the conclusion, expressed in a paper which was in the Press at the time of his death, that B. coli can decompose sugar in at least two different ways, by a lactic fermentation and by a modified alcoholic fermentation. The latter of these is only possible when the organism has been recently grown in the presence of free oxygen. Generalising from this he concluded that alcoholic fermentation is due to the continued action under anaerobic conditions of an enzyme, zymase, which is the surviving portion of the respiratory mechanism of the organism. Whether or not these ideas are accepted, they bear witness to the breadth of vision which was characteristic of their author and provide ample ground for further investigation.
A. H.