George H.

Hitchings
Born: 18 April 1905

Died: 27 February 1998

Affiliation at the time of the award: Wellcome Research Laboratories, Research Triangle Park,
NC, USA

Prize motivation: "for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment"
Autobiography
My forebears all came from the United Kingdom. On my father's side, they migrated from
London and County Derry in Northern Ireland to Londonderry, New Hampshire. When the
American Revolution came, they, as loyalists, moved on to Canada. My father, grandfather and
great-grandfather were born in St. Andrews, New Brunswick. In 1865, my grandfather, Andrew
Hitchings, moved his family to Eureka, California. Andrew was a skilled craftsman in the
building of wooden ships, and my father, George Herbert Hitchings, Sr., followed in his
footsteps, eventually becoming a marine architect and master builder.

On my mother's side, Scottish and English prevailed. The first American was one Thomas
Littlejohn from near Edinburgh, who came to the New World about 1735. His descendants,
including Shaws, Eldridges and Thomases, moved about in the Maritime Provinces and New
England. My maternal grandfather and great-grandfather were descendants of the Matthews
family that emigrated twenty-four strong from near Glasgow to Prince Edward Island about
1800. My grandfather, Peter Matthews, married Sara Elizabeth Eldridge, and my mother, Lillian
Matthews, was born in Maine. In 1875, my grandfather moved his family across the United
States. He, too, was a shipbuilder and settled in Eureka.

My mother and father met and were married in Eureka, and my two sisters were born there.
About 1897, Peter Matthews established a shipyard in Hoquiam, Washington, to build lumber
carriers for the E.K. Wood Lumber Company. The company built several schooners a year.
When Peter Matthews died, my father succeeded to the management, which then became
Hitchings and Joyce. Later, my father was master builder and supervisor in Bellingham,
Washington, and Coos Bay, Oregon, and between times he engaged in marine architecture. He
worked in the period between sail and steam and was especially noted for the design of the
transition vessel, the steam schooner, which had a wooden hull and was steam propelled.

I was born in Hoquiam in 1905. Family wanderings put me in grade school in Berkeley and San
Diego, California, as well as in Bellingham and Seattle, Washington. I enjoyed a warm and
loving home environment. A high standard of ethics prevailed in our family, together with a
thirst for knowledge and an urge to teach. In their schooling, my mother and father were limited
to what was available in Eureka, but they were avid readers, especially my father. It is clear to
me in retrospect that he would have been a scientist had opportunities been more easily
attainable.

My father died after a prolonged illness when I was twelve years old. The deep impression made
by this event turned my thoughts toward medicine. This objective shaped my selection of courses
in high school and expressed itself when I was salutatorian at my class graduation. I chose the
life of Pasteur as the subject for my oration. The blending of Pasteur's basic research and
practical results remained a goal throughout my career.

My experiences at Franklin High School in Seattle were notable for another reason. We had a
most heterogeneous population, one that blended upper class and minorities including blacks,
Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese and first generation Catanians. As a result I lost any self-
consciousness I felt in dealing with people from different cultures and backgrounds.

I entered the University of Washington as a premedical student in 1923. The enthusiasm of

faculty and students in the Chemistry Department was very infectious, however, and by the end
of the first year I had become a chemistry major. I earned top grades, election to Phi Beta Kappa
in my junior year, and a degree cum laude in 1927.

I stayed on to earn a master's degree in 1928 with a thesis based on work carried out during the
summer of 1927 at the Puget Sound Biological Station at Friday Harbor, Washington. This
institution later became a branch of the Oceanographic Laboratories of the University of
Washington, largely created and directed by Thomas C. Thompson, who had been my mentor for
my master's thesis. Thompson taught analytical chemistry and was notable for the keen wit and
humorous twists that made his teaching memorable. Perhaps the most useful lessons I learned
from him have to do with the mathematics of the precision of measurement.

For further graduate work I was offered fellowships at the Mayo Foundation and at Harvard. I
chose Harvard, and after one year as a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at
Cambridge, I was accepted as a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Biological Chemistry at
Harvard Medical School. I had intended to work with Otto Folin, but it was his habit to assign
first-year Fellows to Cyrus Fiske for a year. By the end of the year, I was caught up in the Fiske-
Subbarow program, and Folin very generously allowed me to continue there. After the discovery
of phosphocreatine, this group had detected and isolated adenosine triphosphate. My assignment
was to prepare for physiological studies by developing analytic methods (on a scale then viewed
as 'micro' - 1 mg or less) for the purine bases. These methods constituted my dissertation and
several early publications.