Vernon M. Ingram

Ingram was born in Breslau, Lower Silesia. When he was 14, he and his family left Nazi Germany because of their opposition to Nazism and settled in England. During the Second World War, Ingram worked at a chemical factory producing drugs for the war effort and at night studied at Birkbeck College at the University of London. He received a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1945 and a PhD in organic chemistry in 1949. After receiving his doctorate, Ingram worked at postdoctoral appointments at the Rockefeller Institute and Yale University. At Rockefeller, he worked with Moses Kunitz on crystallizing proteins. While at Yale, he studied peptide chemistry with Joseph Fruton. In 1952, Ingram returned to England and started working at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, studying protein chemistry. In 1956, Ingram and John A. Hunt determined that the change in the hemoglobin molecule in sickle cell disease and trait was the substitution of the glutamic acid in pos