Ernest Lester Smith

Ernest Lester Smith FRS (7 August 1904, Teddington – 6 November 1992, Bradfield St George) was an English biochemist, Theosophist and vegetarian. He is known for his role in the UK's production of penicillin during World War II and for the postwar isolation of vitamin B₁₂ from liver.

E. Lester Smith was the only child of Lester Davis Smith (1877–1962) and Rose Annie Smith née Nettleton (1877–1940). Smith's father was a Theosophist and vegetarian who was widely read in ethics and religion. His mother was also a Theosophist, but was not enthusiastic about following a vegetarian diet. Smith became a vegetarian at an early age.

During World War I, Smith's father was a politically active pacifist and conscientious objector and in 1917 he became unemployed because of his anti-war activities. After secondary education from 1916 to 1920 at Wood Green County School, Smith wanted to study chemistry at a university. However, his family's poverty caused him to delay his formal education. He worked for a year in a pharmacy near the British Museum. From 1921 to 1925 he studied the BSc course in physics, chemistry, and mathematics at Chelsea Polytechnic (which went through several transitions and eventually became the Chelsea Campus of King's College London).

In 1925, at the age of 21, he passed the examination for the Associateship (a qualification equivalent to a bachelor's degree) of the Royal Institute of Chemistry (which became in 1980 the Royal Society of Chemistry) and the London External BSc (granted by the University of London) with 1st class honours in chemistry. He spent an additional year at Chelsea Polytechnic to work for an MSc, which he completed by 1926. In 1927 the Journal of the Chemical Society published three of his papers.

Smith became an employee of the Glaxo Department of Joseph Nathan & Company in January 1926 and continued working for Glaxo until his retirement in 1964. On behalf of Glaxo, he was the author or co-author of twelve patents related to his collaborative research on penicillin, long-chain aliphatic amines, vitamin B₁₂, and other topics. In 1931 in Holloway, London, he married Winifred Rose Fitch (1907–1989). During his career, Glaxo underwent several reorganisations. In 1935 the Glaxo Department became a separate subsidiary, Glaxo Laboratories Ltd., and moved to a new facility in Greenford — for many years, Smith and his wife lived in a house in Pinner. In 1947 Joseph Nathan & Company ceased to exist, and Glaxo Laboratories became a separate company, but the Smiths continued to live in Pinner until 1964.

At the beginning of his career at Glaxo, E. Lester Smith continued the work, started by Harry Jephcott and Alfred L. Bacharach, on efficient extraction of vitamin A, as well as vitamin D, from fish-liver oils. While pursuing his research on such vitamin extraction, Smith realised that his work, on the cold saponification of these fish-liver oils together with solvent extraction of unsaponifiable matter containing the vitamins, provided promising material for writing a doctoral thesis. With a leave of absence from Glaxo, he registered for a PhD with the London University and returned to Chelsea Polytechnic for 6 months before returning to Glaxo in 1931. After three years of working full time at Glaxo and part time at Chelsea Polytechnic, his research was published and presented, not for the PhD but, on his tutor's recommendation, upgraded for a D.Sc., which was awarded in 1933 by the University of London.

Following George R. Minot and William P. Murphy’s 1926 paper Treatment of pernicious anaemia by a special diet, researchers made intensive efforts to extract from liver the factor for treatments of pernicious anaemia. In 1935 the pharmacists Per Laland and Aage Klem of the Norwegian pharmaceutical company Nyegaard & Co. devised a method for making a purified liver extract, for which injection successfully treated cases of pernicious anaemia. Glaxo obtained a licence to manufacture the extract and sent Smith, in September 1936, to Oslo to master the process. Glaxo manufactured the extract at Greenford and in 1937 started marketing the extract under the name ‘Examen’. Smith's work to improve the Laland-Klem process and to isolate the active principle, was halted when WW II started in September 1939.

At the beginning of WW II, Glaxo diverted Smith to development work on wartime production of medical products. Following the 1940 publication of the paper Penicillin as a chemotherapeutic agent by Ernst Chain, Howard Florey, and five other co-authors, Glaxo began working on possible production methods for penicillin. Glaxo's factories, despite wartime shortages, provided more than 80% of the British penicillin available for the June 1944 D-day invasion. Smith played a wide-ranging and important role in Glaxo's production of penicillin. in