Anthony Campbell

Anthony Keith Campbell FLS, FLSW, CBE (born 30 April 1945) is a British biochemist and honorary Professor based in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Cardiff University in Wales. He is a specialist in intracellular signaling, particularly calcium and bioluminescence. He invented the application of a chemiluminescent label in immunoassay and DNA testing, developed with colleagues, and now used in several hundred million clinical tests per year worldwide. He also proposed that the illness that afflicted Charles Darwin for fifty years may have lactose and food intolerance. Early life and career Anthony Campbell (Tony) was born in Bangor, North Wales, but grew up in London, attending the City of London School. He obtained an exhibition at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and then a first-class degree in Natural Sciences, and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry, at Cambridge University. In 1970, he spent three months as a post-doctoral worker with Bo Hellman at the University of Umeå, Sweden. He moved to Cardiff as a lecturer in Medical Biochemistry at the then Welsh National School of Medicine in 1970. He became Professor in Medical Biochemistry there in 1991, and later, a Professor in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Cardiff University. Research His research has focused on cell signaling. He has studied intracellular calcium as a cell regulator for over 50 years, pioneering the application of Ca2+-activated bioluminescent proteins to measure free Ca2+ in live animal, plant, bacterial, and archaeal cells; he has published books on intracellular calcium as a universal regulator. He is an expert on bioluminescence, having developed the use of genetically engineered bioluminescent proteins to measure chemical processes in live cells. His study of bioluminescence began during his Ph.D. in Cambridge when he developed firefly luciferase to measure ATP in liver organ cultures. At the Marine Biological Association laboratory in Plymouth during the 1970s, he studied the bioluminescent hydroid Obelia geniculata. As a result of research on deep-sea bioluminescent organisms on the research ship RRS Discovery, he discovered that coelenterazine is the substance responsible for bioluminescent in at least eight phyla – Cnidaria, Ctenophora, Protozoa, Chaetognatha, Mollusca, Arthropoda, Echinodermata, Chordata, and that bioluminescence is the major communication system in the deep sea.