Sir Walter Norman Haworth

Sir Walter Norman Haworth
(1883-1950)

British chemist, cowinner, with the Swiss chemist Paul Karrer, of the 1937 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work in determining the chemical structures of carbohydrates and vitamin C.
Haworth graduated from the University of Manchester in 1906 and received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Gottingen in 1910. He taught at the University of St. Andrews (1912-20) and the University of Durham (1920-25). Haworth joined the faculty of St. Andrews University in 1912. While at St. Andrews, he worked with the British chemists Sir James Irvine and Thomas Purdie in the study of carbohydrates, including sugars, starch, and cellulose. They found that sugars have a ringlike, rather than a straight-line, arrangement of their carbon atoms; these ringlike representations of sugar molecules have come to be known as Haworth formulas. Haworth's book The Constitution of Sugars (1929) became a standard text.

In 1925 Haworth became director of the chemistry department at the University of Birmingham, where he turned to the study of vitamin C, which is structurally similar to simple sugars. In 1934, with the British chemist Sir Edmund Hirst, he succeeded in synthesizing the vitamin, the first to be artificially produced. This accomplishment not only constituted a valuable addition to knowledge of organic chemistry but also made possible the cheap production of vitamin C (or ascorbic acid, as Haworth called it) for medical purposes. Haworth was knighted in 1947.