Brian Selby Hartley

Education Hartley was educated at Queens' College, Cambridge graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1947 followed by a Master of Arts degree in 1952. for research supervised by Malcolm Dixon and Bernard A. Kilby. In 1965, he became a founding member of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), and collaborated with David Mervyn Blow in determining the structure and mechanism of chymotrypsin, as part of extensive work on chymotrypsin and related enzymes.

His group also showed that mammalian serine proteases, including the blood clotting cascade, had homologous structures and mechanisms, indicating a common evolutionary origin. Hartley also studied other enzymes, such as aminoacyl tRNA synthetases (with Alan Fersht), xylose isomerase and glucose isomerase.

In 1974, Hartley became Head of the Department of Biochemistry at Imperial College London, converting it into a centre for molecular biology. In 1982, he conceived the need for a discipline – biotechnology – to exploit molecular biology breakthroughs. He left the Department of Biochemistry to set up Imperial's Centre for Biotechnology, and became a founding board member of Biogen – the longest surviving genetic engineering company. Since then, Hartley has founded companies to make cheap bioethanol from waste hemicellulosic biomass, using genetically engineered compost heap microorganisms.