John Berry HaycraftJohn Berry Haycraft, FRSE, was a British physician and physiology professor who lived from 15 March 1857 to 30 December 1922). He conducted significant medical research. Haycraft, the son of actuary John Berry Haycraft, was born in Lewes, East Sussex England, in the year 1857. Sir Thomas Haycraft, a judge in the British Colonial Service, was his younger brother. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where in 1888 he graduated with a DSc in public health and an MD on the evolution, history, and use of the chelonian carapace. He spent some time working in Ludwig's Leipzig laboratory. He was chosen to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1880. Sir William Turner, William Rutherford, Sir Thomas Richard Fraser, and Peter Guthrie Tait were the proposers. He was named Mason College's chair of physiology in 1881. He brought in a lot of pupils to Birmingham when he was a teacher there. Haycraft had been studying blood coagulation extensively during his time in Birmingham and Edinburgh. In 1884, he found that the leech secreted a potent anticoagulant that he named hirudin, though it wasn't fully understood until the 1950s and its structure wasn't fully established until 1976. Read More Read Less