Henrik Kacser

Dr Henrik Kacser FRSE (22 September 1918 – 13 March 1995) was a Romanian-born biochemist and geneticist who worked in Britain in the 20th century. Henrik's achievements have been recognised by his election to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1990, by an Honorary Doctorate of the University of Bordeaux II in 1993.

Henrik (or Henrick) Kacser was born in Câmpina, Romania, in 1918 to Sona Kacser, an engineer, and his wife, both of Austro-Hungarian descent. The family moved to Berlin, where Henrik went to the Tretscher School.

Before the World War II, he move to Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he did his undergraduate (BSc 1940, MSc 1942) and postgraduate work (PhD 1949) at the Queen's University of Belfast. There he studied chemistry, specialising in physical chemistry as a postgraduate student. He went to Edinburgh University in 1952 as a Nuffield Fellow under a scheme to introduce physical scientists into biology. This was to become the start of his work as a geneticist/biochemist. He got the Diploma of Animal Genetics, and in 1955 he became appointed lecturer in the department of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh.

In most of his research his original training physical chemistry is quite evident as he focused mainly on the physical/chemical aspects of biology. Much of his early work includes work on practical chemistry, kinetics of enzyme reactions and very little on genetics. His work falls into four distinct categories: 1. building a foundation in physical chemistry; 2. development of metabolic control analysis; 3. consolidation and 4. expansion. Only in the third phase of his career his expertise in genetics came to light when he set out to find experimental models to demonstrate the correctness of his paper on metabolic control analysis.

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