David Keilin

David Keilin was a British Jewish scientist who worked mainly on entomology, born in Moscow on 21 March 1887, whose family returned to Warsaw early in his youth. He did not attend school until age ten because of ill health and asthma, enrolled at the University of Liège in 1904, and later studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and became a British citizen. In 1915 he became research assistant to George Nuttall, the first Quick Professor of Biology at the University of Cambridge, spent the rest of his career there, and succeeded Nuttall as Quick Professor and director of the Molteno Institute in 1931. He made extensive contributions to entomology and parasitology, publishing thirty-nine papers between 1914 and 1923 on subjects including the reproduction of lice and the life-cycle of the horse bot-fly, and he is best known for his rediscovery of cytochrome in the 1920s, the name being his own. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1926 and won its Royal Medal in 1939 and its Copley Medal in 1951. He died on 27 February 1963.