Peters, Rudolph Albert

Born Apr. 13, 1889, in Kensington, London. British biochemist. Member of the Royal Society of London (1935).

Peters graduated in 1914, having attended King’s College in London and Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge. He became a doctor of medicine in 1919. He was a professor of biochemistry at Oxford University from 1923 to 1954; between 1946 and 1963 he held professorships at universities in St. Louis and New York in the United States and at Cambridge in Great Britain. Peters headed the biochemistry department of the agricultural research council at the Institute of Animal Physiology in Cambridge, Great Britain, from 1954 to 1959. From 1958 to 1961 he was president of the International Council of Scientific Unions.

Peters studied biochemical-changes that are responsible for a number of pathological conditions. In particular, he established that thiamine deficiency in the diet gives rise to disorders in the catalytic activity of the pyruvate oxidase system. He also synthesized antilewisite and explained how fluoroacetate exerts its toxic effect. Peters is an honorary member of many foreign academies of sciences, scientific societies, and universities.