When Jack Drummond, the earliest UCL Professor of Biochemistry, isolated Vitamin A in the 1930s, he needed to process large quantities of fish liver oils and later, wheat germ. Drummond, whose chair was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, was helped by Maxwell Donald, a young lecturer in Chemical Engineering. So began the linkage of departments that created UCL Biochemical Engineering. Following war service, Donald, now Head of Department, worked with Ernest Baldwin, Head of Biochemistry, to establish a joint Diploma, later a Masters course in Biochemical Engineering and put forward a visionary biochemist, Eric Crook, as first Professor of Biochemical Engineering. The less visionary University of London, which then regulated these matters, blocked the appointment. Not to be put off, Donald and Crook set about establishing a journal. They discovered that Elmer Gaden was pursuing a similar goal against a background of rapid recognition in the USA of the significance of the field. The Journal of Biochemical and Microbiological Technology and Engineering, now Biotechnology and Bioengineering, was formed under their joint editorship. Meanwhile, a young biochemist, Malcolm Lilly, had finished a PhD in microbiology with Pat Clarke in 1962 in the UCL Biochemistry Department and was expecting to work under Eric Crook. When Crook was obliged to take a Biochemistry Chair elsewhere in London, the future hung in the balance. However, a joint grant from the Whitehall Foundation of New York to Eric Crook and Malcolm Lilly, now in the Chemical Engineering Department, saved the day. It was for a study of enzymes on solid supports. Malcolm Lilly created a broad program of biochemical engineering research while an industrial biochemist, Fife Webb, built the Diploma course with Pat Clarke's biological input and wrote one of the field's first monographs (Webb, 1964). Within a short space of time, Malcolm Lilly had initiated research on separation of nucleotides (Lilly, 1965), single-cell protein production from hydrocarbons (Ertola et al., 1965), biological fuel cells (Gray Young et al., 1966), continuous culture (Baidya et al., 1967), and mammalian cell culture (Self et al., 1968).
For reasons of space as well as the context of Malcolm Lilly's death, this article focuses just on the subsequent developments at UCL. Therefore, it is important to note at the outset that these developments were part of the birth of a new subject, initially in just a few departments in the world-subsequently in many. The exciting field today is the summation of contributions from a host of laboratories, and its central foundations have been built by a group of distinguished pioneers of whom Malcolm Lilly was one.