[3] His father was a civil engineer, and on his mother's side there were several scientists including the physicist Karl Weissenberg.

[5] However, the political turmoil of the 1930s forced him to leave Austria for England after the Anschluss of 1938.

After several years at the National Institute for Research in Dairying in Shinfield, Berkshire, Gutfreund spent most of his career at the University of Bristol, where he worked on proteolytic enzymes, including chymotrypsin and trypsin,[7] and was especially active in using methods of studying fast reactions to study enzyme mechanisms.

[8] Although in his first book[9] he had suggested that metabolite channelling (direct transfer of intermediates between enzymes) might occur, in his later years he became hostile to this notion, particularly in relation to glycolysis.

[10] Gutfreund is also known for his textbooks on various aspects of enzyme catalysis: He was elected to the Royal Society in 1981.