Otto Folin


Otto Knut Olof Folin was a Swedish-born American chemist who is best known for his groundbreaking work at Harvard University on practical micromethods for the determination of the constituents of protein-free blood filtrates and the discovery of creatine phosphate in muscles.

Background

Folin was born in Åseda, Småland in Sweden. He was the seventh of twelve children of Nils Magnus Folin and Eva Olson. He moved to America at the age of fifteen following two brothers and an aunt who had already settled there. He carried on his schooling in Stillwater, Minnesota. He moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota entering the University of Minnesota and completed his B.S in 1892.

Career

In 1896, Folin returned to Sweden and began his research in the laboratory of Prof. Olof Hammarsten at Uppsala University. In 1897, he left to work in the laboratory of the chemist, Ernst Leopold Salkowski at the Pathological Institute of Charité in Berlin, Germany. In 1890, he became a citizen of the United States. He joined the University of Chicago gaining his Ph.D. in 1898.
In 1899 he was appointed assistant professor at West Virginia University. He moved to the McLean Hospital Boston in 1900 as a research biochemist, eventually moving to Harvard Medical School in 1907 as an associate professor of biological chemistry, becoming the Hamilton Kuhn Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology in 1909. Together with Vintilă Ciocâlteu Otto Folin designed the Folin-Ciocalteu reagent to detect polyphenols. In 1920, he co-developed with Hsien Wu the Folin-Wu method of assaying glucose in protein-free filtrates of blood.
Folin was elected the president of the American Society of Biological Chemists in 1909. He was a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and was awarded the Carl Wilhelm Scheele Medal of the Swedish Chemical Society in 1930.

Selected works