Juda Hirsch Quastel, (October 2, 1899 – October 15, 1987) was a British-Canadian biochemist who pioneered diverse research in neurochemistry, soil metabolism, cellular metabolism, and cancer. Biography Quastel, also known as "Harry" or "Q," was born at Ecclesall Road in Sheffield the son of Jonas Quastel, a confectioner, and his wife, Flora Itcovitz. His parents had come to Britain in 1897 from Tarnopol in Galicia (Eastern Europe) and were married in Britain. He was named after his grandfather, Juda Quastel, a chemist in Tarnapol. He was educated at Sheffield Central Secondary School. In the First World War he served with the British Army as a Laboratory Assistant at St George's Hospital from 1917 to 1919. Electing to study chemistry, Quastel received a baccalaureate from Imperial College London in 1921. Pursuing graduate work at the University of Cambridge, Quastel studied with Frederick Gowland Hopkins, the leading figure in British biochemistry and a future Nobel Prize recipient for his work on the nutritional importance of vitamins. Under Hopkins, Quastel received a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Cambridge in biochemistry in 1924 and, not long after, was made a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Quastel remained in Hopkins’ department as a demonstrator and lecturer from 1923 to 1929, during which he pioneered the research of microbial enzymology. He obtained a doctorate of science from Cambridge in 1926 and received a Beit Memorial Fellowship in 1928. Quastel accepted a position as Director of Research at the Cardiff City Mental Hospital in 1930. From this location, he was able to conduct early work on the enzymology and metabolism of the brain. For these studies, Quastel was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1940. In 1941, when Britain's wartime food supply emerged as a strategic concern, the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) asked Quastel to lead a new research unit focused on improving crop yield at the Rothamsted Experimental Station. By analyzing soil as a dynamic system, rather than an inert substance, he was able to apply techniques such as perfusion, with which he had become familiar in studies of animal organs. On this approach, Quastel later wrote (1946) that "soil as a whole can be considered an organ comparable in some respects to a liver or a gland to which may be added various nutrients, pure or complex degraded plant materials, rain, air, and in which enzymatic reactions can