My father, Alan Eddy, who has died aged 90, was the founding professor of biochemistry at Umist - the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology – where he carried out groundbreaking work with yeast. He was appointed professor and head of the department of biochemistry in 1959, and was in the vanguard of Umist’s transformation into a leading university.
Born in St Just, Cornwall, Alan was the son of Ellen (nee Berryman) and Alfred Eddy. His mother was a teacher; his father worked as an assayer (working out how much metal there was in rocks) in the local tin mines and later, after qualifying as an accountant, as a salesman for the Burroughs Adding Machine company. Alan showed early academic promise, winning a scholarship to Devonport high school and then an open scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, to study chemistry. At Oxford he rowed for the college and, as a member of the athletics club, trained with Roger Bannister.
Graduating with a first in 1949, Alan was awarded a DPhil in 1951. He remained at Oxford as an ICI fellow, under the Nobel prizewinner Sir Cyril Hinshelwood. For Alan’s DPhil project, he chose yeast and it remained his principal experimental organism for the rest of his career. He joined the Brewing Industry Research Foundation (BRF) in 1953, where he cut a dashing figure commuting on his 500cc motorbike.
While at the BRF, Alan and a colleague, Don Williamson, developed a technique that used snails’ gut juice to digest away tough yeast cell walls to produce what are known as protoplasts. This technical advance had enormous consequences. Early techniques to engineer yeast with recombinant DNA exploited protoplasts, and protoplasting also enabled the isolation of the membrane-bound compartments of the yeast cells. This opened the way for yeast to become the leading model for molecular cell biology, with seven 21st-century Nobel prize recipients having worked with the organism.
At Umist, Alan pioneered the study of how molecules are transported into cells across the plasma membrane. He was one of the first people to understand, and promote, Peter Mitchell’s chemiosmotic hypothesis, which proposed an explanation of how cells use the energy from sources such as food and sunlight to make the compound (ATP) that powers them.
Alan led and nurtured a thriving department comprising 35 academics, many with international reputations. From the late 1960s he contributed to the Open University, in a series of broadcast lectures. Despite retiring in 1994, he continued to publish and to conduct laboratory research supported by a grant until 2012.
He was widely read and his interests were reflected in a home filled with books. He travelled extensively but maintained a lifelong love of Cornwall, the Peak District and France.
In 1954 Alan married Susan Slade-Jones. She survives him along with two sons, Phin and me, four grandchildren, and a great-grandchild.
