Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins OM FRS[2] (20 June 1861 – 16 May 1947) was an English biochemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1929, with Christiaan Eijkman, for the discovery of vitamins.

[5] He was a lecturer in chemical physiology at Emmanuel College, Cambridge in March 1900, when he received the academic rank Master of Arts (MA) honoris causa.

Hopkins had for a long time studied how cells obtain energy via a complex metabolic process of oxidation and reduction reactions.

His study in 1907 with Sir Walter Morley Fletcher of the connection between lactic acid and muscle contraction was one of the central achievements of his work on the biochemistry of the cell.

[11] Their work paved the way for the later discovery by Archibald Hill and Otto Fritz Meyerhof that a carbohydrate metabolic cycle supplies the energy used for muscle contraction.

This led him to suggest the existence in normal diets of tiny quantities of as yet unidentified substances that are essential for animal growth and survival.

[12] It was this work that led his being awarded (together with Christiaan Eijkman) the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

[5] Other significant honours were his election in 1905 as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), Great Britain's most prestigious scientific organisation; his knighthood by King George V in 1925; and the award in 1935 of the Order of Merit, Great Britain's most exclusive civilian honour.