Ernest Lester Smith

Ernest Lester Smith (7 August 1904, Teddington – 6 November 1992, Bradfield St George) was an English biochemist, Theosophist and vegetarian. He is known for his role in the UK's production of penicillin during World War II and for the postwar isolation of vitamin B12 from liver.

Biography

E. Lester Smith was the only child of Lester Davis Smith (1877–1962) and Rose Annie Smith née Nettleton (1877–1940). Smith's father was a Theosophist and vegetarian who was widely read in ethics and religion. His mother was also a Theosophist, but was not enthusiastic about following a vegetarian diet. researchers made intensive efforts to extract from liver the factor for treatments of pernicious anaemia. In 1935 the pharmacists Per Laland and Aage Klem of the Norwegian pharmaceutical company Nyegaard & Co. devised a method for making a purified liver extract, for which injection successfully treated cases of pernicious anaemia. Glaxo obtained a licence to manufacture the extract and sent Smith, in September 1936, to Oslo to master the process. Glaxo manufactured the extract at Greenford and in 1937 started marketing the extract under the name ‘Examen’. Smith's work to improve the Laland-Klem process and to isolate the active principle, was halted when WW II started in September 1939. Glaxo began working on possible production methods for penicillin. Glaxo's factories, despite wartime shortages, provided more than 80% of the British penicillin available for the June 1944 D-day invasion. Smith played a wide-ranging and important role in Glaxo's production of penicillin. in In 1948, almost simultaneously with an American team led by Merck's Karl Folkers, Smith's team isolated vitamin B12 in crystalline form. Using samples supplied by Smith, Charles Cady Ungley demonstrated that the newly isolated factor was highly effective as a treatment for pernicious anaemia. Smith's team made the first physical measurements on vitamin B12 and thoroughly researched the vitamin's physical and chemical properties. His team collaborated extensively with Alexander Todd's group in Cambridge and with Dorothy Hodgkin's laboratory in Oxford.

In 1957 Smith was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was awarded in 1954 the gold medal in Therapeutics of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, in 1955 the Lister Memorial Lectureship of the Society of Chemical Industry, and in 1967 the Hanbury Gold Medal of the Pharmaceutical Society. In 1977 the Theosophical Society awarded him the Subba Row Medal.

For Theosophical Publishing House, Smith was the editor of The Dynamic Universe (1963) with Corona Trew and Intelligence Came First (1975). The latter book argued that evolution is directed by intelligent design. He also authored Occult Chemistry Re-Evaluated (1982), Our Last Adventure (1985) a book on life after death and Inner Adventures: Thought, Intuition, and Beyond (1988).

Selected publications