Basil Lythgoe, FRS (18 August 1913 — 18 April 2009) was a British
organic chemist who investigated the structure of many natural substances including
nucleosides, plant toxins, and
vitamin D2. He was Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Leeds.
Biography
Basil Lythgoe was born in
Leigh
Leigh may refer to:
Places In England
Pronounced :
* Leigh, Greater Manchester, Borough of Wigan
** Leigh (UK Parliament constituency)
* Leigh-on-Sea, Essex
Pronounced :
* Leigh, Dorset
* Leigh, Gloucestershire
* Leigh, Kent
* Leigh, Staf ...
, the second of three children of Peter Whittaker Lythgoe (company secretary of a local textile firm) and Agnes Lily Lythgoe (née Shepherd). Basil, like his father, attended
Leigh Grammar School. Aided by a county grant he progressed to the
University of Manchester in 1930. His final degree examinations were delayed by a severe throat infection; he graduated in 1934, with first class honours.
Lythgoe stayed at Manchester to work or his PhD, supervised by
Professor I W Heilbron, FRS; it was awarded in 1936. He then joined
ICI in
Huddersfield, where he worked on a synthetic dye. But he soon returned to the University of Manchester as an assistant lecturer, where he worked with
Alexander Todd, successor to Heibron.
In 1946 Lythgoe accompanied Todd to the
Cambridge as an “assistant in research’” – he was later promoted to Lecturer. Their main area of research was
nucleosides. Their findings, and those of others in the group, contributed to determining the correct structure of
DNA. By 1948 Lythgoe was working independently, although still on nucleosides. Later, he turned his attention to the structure of macrozamin, a very toxic natural substance.
In 1953 Basil Lythgoe moved to the
University of Leeds to take up the professorship of organic chemistry.
One of his principal research areas for many years was
taxine alkaloids. Lythgoe was an early user of
nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), which helped him determine the correct structure of taxine-I.
Another extensive area of research was
calciferol
Vitamin D is a group of Lipophilicity, fat-soluble secosteroids responsible for increasing intestinal absorption of calcium, magnesium, and phosphate, and many other biological effects. In humans, the most important compounds in this group ar ...
s. In one paper he described the synthesis of
cholecalciferol, which involved the use of the
Wittig reaction. It was “early days for Wittig reagents, and possibly Lythgoe saw this as one of the strengths of the work in the 1958 paper”.
[
Basil Lythgoe retired in 1978.
]
Honours
Lythgoe was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1958.[ He also was appointed to the Tilden Lectureship of the Chemical Society in 1958, received the Synthetic Organic Chemistry Award of the Chemical Society and the Simonsen Lectureship of the Chemical Society in 1978 and the Chemical Society Award for Organic Synthesis in 1979.
]
Family
The engagement of Basil Lythgoe and the mathematician Kathleen (Kate) Cameron Hallum was announced in April 1946. They had met at Manchester and were married on 29 June.[
Kate died in Leeds on 10 July 2003. Basil Lythgoe developed dementia in later life. He died on 18 April 2009 at a nursing home in Wychbold.
]
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lythgoe, Basil
People from Leigh, Greater Manchester
British chemists
Organic chemists
Fellows of the Royal Society
Alumni of the University of Manchester
Alumni of the University of Cambridge
Alumni of the University of Leeds
Academics of the University of Manchester
Academics of the University of Cambridge
Fellows of King's College, Cambridge
Academics of the University of Leeds
1913 births
2009 deaths