Haworth worked out the correct structure of a number of sugars, and is known among organic chemists for his development of theHaworth projection that translates three-dimensional sugar structures into convenient two-dimensional graphical form.
Having worked for some time from the age of fourteen in the local Ryland'slinoleum factory managed by his father, he studied for and successfully passed the entrance examination to theUniversity of Manchester in 1903 to study chemistry. He made this pursuit in spite of active discouragement by his parents. He gained his first-class honours degree in 1906. After gaining his master's degree underWilliam Henry Perkin Jr., he was awarded an1851 Research Fellowship from theRoyal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851[5] and studied at theUniversity of Göttingen earning his PhD inOtto Wallach's laboratory after only one year of study. ADSc from the University of Manchester followed in 1911, after which he served a short time at the Imperial College of Science and Technology as Senior Demonstrator in Chemistry.
In 1912 Haworth became a lecturer at United College ofUniversity of St Andrews in Scotland and became interested incarbohydrate chemistry, which was being investigated at St Andrews by Thomas Purdie (1843–1916) andJames Irvine (1877–1952). Haworth began his work on simple sugars in 1915 and developed a new method for the preparation of the methylethers of sugars usingmethyl sulfate and alkali (now calledHaworth methylation). He then began studies on the structural features of thedisaccharides. Haworth organised the laboratories at St Andrews University for the production of chemicals and drugs for theBritish government duringWorld War I (1914–1918).
He was appointed Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Armstrong College (Newcastle upon Tyne) ofDurham University in 1920. The next year Haworth was appointed Head of the Chemistry Department at the college. It was during his time in the North East of England that he married Violet Chilton Dobbie.
In 1925 he was appointed Mason Professor of Chemistry at theUniversity of Birmingham (a position he held until 1948). Among his lasting contributions to science was the confirmation of a number of structures of optically active sugars: by 1928, he had deduced and confirmed, among others, the structures ofmaltose,cellobiose,lactose,gentiobiose,melibiose, gentianose,raffinose, as well as theglucoside ring tautomeric structure of aldose sugars. He published a classic text in 1929,The Constitution of Sugars.[2]
In 1933, working with the then Assistant Director of Research (later Sir)Edmund Hirst and a team led by post-doctoral studentMaurice Stacey (who in 1956 rose to the same Mason Chair), having properly deduced the correct structure and optical-isomeric nature of vitamin C, Haworth reported the synthesis of the vitamin.[6] Haworth had been given his initial reference sample of "water-soluble vitamin C" or "hexuronic acid" (the previous name for the compound as extracted from natural products) by Hungarian physiologistAlbert Szent-Györgyi, who had codiscovered its vitamin properties along withCharles Glen King, and had more recently discovered that it could be extracted in bulk from Hungarianpaprika. In honour of the compound's antiscorbutic properties, Haworth andSzent-Györgyi now proposed the new name of "a-scorbic acid" for the molecule, withL-ascorbic acid as its formal chemical name. During World War II, he was a member of theMAUD Committee which oversaw research on the British atomic bomb project.[2]
Haworth is commemorated at theUniversity of Birmingham in the Haworth Building, which houses most of the University of Birmingham School of Chemistry. The School has a Haworth Chair of Chemistry, held by Professor Nigel Simpkins from 2007 until his retirement in 2017,[7] and byProfessor Neil ChampnessArchived 30 June 2021 at theWayback Machine since 2021.
In 1977 theRoyal Mail issued a postage stamp (one of a series of four) featuring Haworth's achievement in synthesising vitamin C and his Nobel prize.[8]
He also developed a simple method of representing on paper the three-dimensional structure of sugars. The representation, using perspective, now known as aHaworth projection, is still widely used in biochemistry.[9]
^Davies, Michael B.; Austin, John; Partridge, David A. (1991),Vitamin C: Its Chemistry and Biochemistry, The Royal Society of Chemistry, p. 48,ISBN0-85186-333-7
