Archibald Garrod

Archibald Garrod (1857-1936) was an English physician who served as Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford from 1920 to 1927. He is credited with founding the field of inborn errors of metabolism, discovering that the condition alkaptonuria follows Mendelian inheritance and arises from a specific biochemical defect. His 1909 lectures, published as Inborn Errors of Metabolism, identified four such conditions, later called Garrod's tetrad: alkaptonuria, cystinuria, pentosuria and albinism. He introduced the concept of chemical individuality, proposing that individual human beings differ in their biochemistry and therefore in their susceptibility to particular diseases, an idea regarded as anticipating later understanding of genetic variation in medicine.