Gilbert Smithson Adair

Gilbert Smithson Adair FRS (1896-1979) was an early protein scientist who used osmotic pressure measurements to establish that hemoglobin was a tetramer under physiological conditions. This conclusion led him to be the first to identify cooperative binding, in the context of oxygen binding to hemoglobin.

Personal life

Adair was born in 1896 in Whitehaven, England and was largely home-schooled. Entering King's College, Cambridge in 1915, he graduated with a first class degree in natural sciences in 1917. During the war, he worked on the Food Investigation Board, which sought methods for preserving food on cargo ships. In 1920, he became a research student at King's College, and was made an official Fellow in 1928, granting him five years to devote to research. In 1931, he became assistant director of the Physiological Laboratory in Cambridge. He was a Reader in Biophysics from 1945 until his retirement in 1963. Adair was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1939.

As an incidental historical note, Adair provided the purified hemoglobin that Max Perutz used for the first structure determination of any protein (by X-ray crystallography).

References

• Edsall JT. (1992) "Memories of early days in protein science, 1926-1940", Protein Sci., 1, 1526-1530.
• Simoni RD, Hill RL, Vaughan M. (2002) "The Structure and Function of Hemoglobin: Gilbert Smithson Adair and the Adair Equations", J. Biol. Chem., 277, e20.
• Adair GS. (1925) "A Critical Study of the Direct Method of Measuring the Osmotic Pressure of Haemoglobin", Proc. Roy. Soc. London, Ser. A, 108, 627-637.
• Adair GS. (1925) "The Hemoglobin System. VI. The Oxygen Dissociation Curve of Hemoglobin", J. Biol. Chem., 63, 529-545.