Rudolph Peters

Sir Rudolph Albert Peters (13 April 1889, Kensington - 29 January 1982) was a British biochemist. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1935. His effort investigating the mechanism of arsenic war gases was deemed crucial in maintaining battlefield effectiveness facing the threat of lewisite attacks. An Oxford scientific team led by Peters developed an antidote for lewisite called British Anti-Lewisite (BAL) on July 21, 1940.

After the war, he subsequently carried on his research on pyruvate metabolism, focussing particularly on the toxicity of fluoroacetate. The fact that fluoroacetate in itself is far less toxic that the metabolite formed after transformation in the body led him to coin the term "lethal synthesis" in 1951. The publication was titled "Croonian Lecture: Lethal Synthesis", which appeared in ''Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences'', Vol. 139, No. 895 (Feb. 28, 1952), pp. 143-170