Ralph Kekwick

Ralph's father was Oliver A. Kekwick (1865–1939) a managing clerk in a firm of ships' chandlers in Royal Albert Dock, London.

His mother was Mary E. Price (1868–1958) who, aged 13, was a pupil-teacher at Bromley St Leonard's Church school, Bromley-by-Bow, London.

His elder brother read chemistry at University College London (UCL) and his accounts of this excited Ralph and set him for a career in science.

At age 16, Ralph passed the School Certificate sufficiently to make him eligible for university entrance and he began at UCL in 1925, a month before his 17th birthday.

[1] He returned to UCL as a lecturer from 1933 to 1937, spending a year at the Physical Chemical Institute in Uppsala, Sweden from 1935 to 1937 doing work with Nobel laureate Theodor Svedberg on analytical ultracentrifugation.

Kekwick assisted with the installation and in 1937 a Medical Research Council (MRC) grant supported him working at the Lister where he was offered a post.

[1] A steady flow of research papers based on ultracentrifugal measurements followed and in 1941, in recognition of his contributions to the physicochemical characterisation of proteins, Kekwick was awarded a DSc degree by London University of which the Lister was a part.

In 1940, Sir Percival Hartley, head of the Medical Research Council Biological Standards Division, raised problems with serum and plasma for transfusion.