Sir Archibald Garrod's Conception of Chemical Individuality: A Modern Appreciation

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Abstract
Discussions of the inborn errors of metabolism are usually prefaced by a reference to the original descriptions of these genetic aberrations by Sir Archibald Garrod. It is less well known that in reflecting on the inborn errors, Garrod was led to formulate ideas about what he called chemical individuality. He suggested that all human differences were chemical, taking their origin from variations in the amino acid composition of the cellular proteins, and evolutionary changes leading to interspecific differences could be explained in the same way. These molecular differences between people and species, he thought, must be a reflection of variations in the quality of the molecules of the chromosomes.