My fencing coach Derek Evered, who has died aged 100, began his working life as a lab assistant at 14 and rose to become reader in biochemistry, and deputy to the professor, at Chelsea College of Science and Technology, now part of King’s College London.
His career included visiting posts in Zurich and Cambridge, and he authored more than 125 papers, published in journals including the Lancet and the BMJ, as well as founding the master’s course in biochemistry at Chelsea, and supervising more than 500 dissertations. He specialised in amino acids and inborn errors of metabolism, a group of genetic disorders that includes Hartnup syndrome.
