David Hopkinson obituary

My friend and former colleague David Hopkinson, who has died aged 89, was director of the Medical Research Council's human biochemical genetics unit at University College London from 1976 until its closure in 2000.

Hoppy, as he was universally known, had joined the unit at its inception in 1962 because in an earlier, more junior, position he had been one of the first medical scientists to describe molecular differences in human enzymes, long before DNA sequence differences were known about.