Richard Tecwyn Williams, 20 February 1909 - 29 December 1979

Abstract

The study of foreign compound metabolism is now a well established discipline with important ramifications into pharmacology and toxicology. For its origins one must look to the early part of the nineteenth century and to the work of German organic chemists such as Liebig, Wohler and Keller. They were fascinated by observations that organic substances such as benzoic acid, when introduced into the animal body, underwent chemical reactions similar to those they witnessed occurring in the test tube. The subject rapidly developed during the latter part of the nineteenth century under the influence of German physiological chemists such as Baumann, von Mering, Jaffe and Schmiedeberg. Indeed by 1900 the major pathways of foreign compound metabolism had been described as had been also the concept of ‘Entgiftung’ (detoxication). A factor responsible for this rapid development was the emergence of the new chemical industry manufacturing both heavy chemicals and pharmaceuticals such as acetanilide, aspirin and phenacetin. There was a need to establish a chemical basis to understand the toxic effects of these substances and one adopted approach to this was to study the ‘de-toxification’ of such substances in the animal body. The idea of the importance of metabolic studies in understanding toxic mechanisms is not therefore a new one.