Dr Peter Mitchell
- Born
- 29 September 1920
- Died
- 10 April 1992 (age 71)
Born in Mitcham, Surrey, England on 29th September 1920, Mitchell recollects his parents to be each of very different temperament. His father, Christopher Mitchell was a conventionalist civil servant whilst his mother, Kate Beatrice Dorothy (nee Taplin), felt passionately about independent thought. She was also an atheist and it became apparent Mitchell inherited her beliefs and reasoning to question dogma from a young age.
Educated at Queen's College, Taunton, Mitchell benefited immensely from the headmaster at the time, C.L. Wiseman, an excellent mathematician and musician. According to Mitchell the results of his scholarship entry examinations for Jesus College, Cambridge were so appalling, had it not been for a well-crafted letter by Wiseman his education could have abruptly ended.
In 1939 he began the study of natural sciences at Cambridge and stayed there for 16 years, working his way up from undergraduate level to an accomplished laboratory instructor. During his graduate studies, three instructors, each specialists in different fields of biochemistry, David Keilin, James Danielli and Malcom Dixon, served as his primary teachers and pushed him to begin formulating his views within a firm molecular framework and gave him much guidance in the field.
After obtaining his Ph.D. in 1951 for work on the mode of action of penicillin, Mitchell stayed at Cambridge as a Demonstrator until moving to Edinburgh in 1955.
In Edinburgh Mitchell began to hypothesise his revolutionary principle of chemiosmosis. In the 1960’s it was discovered that a molecule in cells, called ATP, was the energy currency of life. How it formed though was still not well understood and Mitchell began to study the biochemical processes that occur in mitochondria, the organelle that stores ATP. He realised that the movement of hydrogen ions across a membrane could provide the energy needed to create ATP.
Mitchell’s ideas caused intense conflict among scientists for two decades and it wasn’t until the discovery of ATP synthase, an enzyme in the mitochondrial membrane that aids in the production of ATP, that his hypothesis became widely accepted. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1978 for his ideas on biological energy generation.