William Bate Hardy

Sir William Bate Hardy, FRS[1] (6 April 1864 – 23 January 1934) was a British biologist and food scientist.

He was born in Erdington, a suburb of Birmingham, the son of William Hardy of Llangollen and his wife Sarah Bate.

To this end they funded Professor Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1861–1947) in Cambridge with a sum of £210,000 in 1920 for the advancement of his work in biochemistry.

Between them, the two establishments have yielded ten Nobel Prize winners, including Hopkins, for the discovery of vitamins, and professors Howard Florey and Ernst Chain (Oxford), for their developmental work on penicillin.

[1][9] His long-time friend, Sir James Hopwood Jeans, elected as president of the British Science Association after Hardy's death,[10] briefly eulogized him in the opening address to the Association's September 1934 meeting in Aberdeen:[11] [...] one man who will be in our thoughts in a very special sense to-night - Sir William Hardy, whom we had hoped to see in the presidential chair this year.