Professor David John Manners
This issue of Carbohydrate Research is dedicated to Professor David John Manners, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to carbohydrate chemistry and biochemistry.
David Manners was born on 3 1st March, 1928, in Castleford, Yorkshire, an industrial town about 10 miles from Leeds. His secondary education was at the Grammar School, Castleford, which he left in 1946 to enter Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge University, to study Natural Sciences. He obtained a First Class in Natural Sciences Tripos, Part I and Part II, in 1949. On graduation, he elected to study for a Ph.D. degree, and it was at this stage in his career that he came under the influence of the eminent and highly respected carbohydrate chemist David James Bell, who, in the preceding 15 years, had published a series of papers describing chemical studies of glycogen.
Bell persuaded David to undertake studies of structural aspects of glycogens. At an earlier period, the nature of the interchain linkages in glycogen had been the subject of some controversy. Eventually, the (l-6)-E-D-glucosidic linkages were characterised by periodate oxidation, and beta-amylolysis of the glycogen furnished information on the relative lengths of the external and internal chains. Thus, by using glycogen samples prepared under defined conditions and using such enzyme preparations as beta-amylase free from maltase and alpha-amylase, David was able to define the external unit chain lengths of glycogens. At this time, methodology in carbohydrate chemistry was still at a relatively primitive level. Paper and column chromatography were in their infancy, and few enzymes had been purified and characterised sufficiently to be useful in analytical work.
The Ph.D. degree was awarded in 1952, and David then made the long trek north to an appointment as Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry of the University of Edinburgh. In that Department, there was already a strong interest in Carbohydrate Chemistry. Edmund (later Sir Edmund) Hirst had been appointed Professor of Organic Chemistry in 1948 and had laid the foundations for a Carbohydrate School which was to attain considerable prominence. Early staff members included E. G. V. Percival (who sadly died in 1951) and Elizabeth Percival, soon to be joined by Gerald Aspinall, Trevor Greenwood, and Douglas Anderson. This group provided a powerful nucleus for detailed structural studies of a wide variety of polysaccharides.
The next twenty-five years proved to be highly productive in terms of David's contributions to carbohydrate chemistry. From 1952-1964, he was lecturer in Chemistry, during a time when the field of carbohydrate chemistry was expanding rapidly. David's studies of polysaccharides were extended to include glycogens in relation to glycogen storage diseases, other a-D-glucans (amylose, amylopectin, and protozoa1 polysaccharides), and /3-D-glucans (laminarin, lichenin, yeast cell-wall glucans, and