Biographical encyclopedia
[1008] AMUNDSEN WILLST ATTER [1009]
Download 17.33 Mb. Pdf ko'rish
|
|
[1008] AMUNDSEN
WILLST ATTER [1009] torate in astronomy at the University of Virginia. In the course of his work, he studied nebulae, which he thought to represent “island universes” as Kant [293] had believed. His best argument was that there seemed to be numerous very faint novas in some of those nebulas, far more numerous than could be expected and far fainter than if they were objects within our own galaxy. In this view, he collided head on with Shapley [1102], who accepted the obser vations of Adriaan van Maanen (1884-1946) that nebulae rotated more quickly than they should be seen to do if they were indeed very distant. Van Maanen’s observations were mistaken but Shapley didn’t know that. In 1920 Curtis and Shapley met in a great debate before the National Acad emy of Sciences, and at the time it was held that Curtis had the better of it. Cer tainly as the 1920s wore on, it became clear that Curtis was correct and Shapley was mistaken, and in this way the uni verse of the galaxies was for the first time spread out before human eyes in its full glory. [1008] AMUNDSEN, Roald Engelbregt Gravning (ah'moon-sen) Norwegian explorer
1872
Died: near Spitsbergen, June 16, 1928
Amundsen interrupted a medical edu cation to join the Norwegian navy and by 1897 was engaged in an Antarctic ex pedition conducted under Belgian aus pices. This was the first expedition to winter in the Antarctic. As the twentieth century opened, he was exploring the Arctic and in 1903 made his way by sea from the Atlantic to the Pacific along the Arctic coast of North America (the famous Northwest Passage). He sailed secretly, by the way, to avoid his creditors. In 1904 he located the site of the North Magnetic Pole. It took him three years to complete this journey.
When the news of the attainment of the North Pole by Peary [866] reached him, it seemed to Amundsen that the most important remaining unreached area of the planet was the South Pole. At the beginning of 1911 he reached the Antarctic continent and waited for the Antarctic summer season (December through February). In October 1911 he began his dash for the pole, reaching it on December 14 and returning safely, beating Scott [971] by a month. He then added to his laurels by flying from Spitsbergen to Alaska by dirigible in 1926, passing over the North Pole as he did so. He had failed in three previ ous attempts. There were some unpleas ant disputes afterward as to whether he, or a colleague, deserved the credit. He died on another flight over the Arctic in June 1928, in a search for sur vivors of a shipwreck. [1009] WILLSTÅTTER, Richard (vil'- shtet-er) German chemist
13, 1872 Died: Locarno, Switzerland, August 3, 1942 Willstatter, the son of a well-to-do Jewish textile merchant, received his ed ucation at the University of Munich, where he studied under Baeyer [718] and obtained his doctorate in 1894. He served as Baeyer’s private assistant for a time thereafter. His most important research was in connection with plant pigments after he had obtained a professorial position at the University of Zürich in Switzerland in 1905. The plant pigments were inter esting for two reasons. The first was that one of them, chlorophyll, was the means whereby the energy of sunlight was con verted into foodstuffs, so that upon it all life (except for some microorganisms) depended. The second was that the pig ments formed so complex a group of similar substances that the problem of their separation was an almost unbear
[1009] WILLSTATTER EULER-CHELPIN [1011]
ably attractive (if desperately frustrat ing) challenge. The problem had already been solved in its essence by Tsvett [1006] in 1906, who had introduced the technique of chromatography. However, Tsvett’s re port had been published in Russian and it attracted little attention. Willstatter reintroduced the technique and through him and others like Kuhn [1233] it be came important. In fact, when two de cades later the method was adapted for use with filter paper by Martin [1350] and Synge [1394], it became the univer sally used technique for separating mix tures. Willstatter worked out the way in which the magnesium atom was placed in the chlorophyll molecule and showed that the iron atom was held in similar fashion in heme, the colored portion of the hemoglobin molecule. Willstatter was honored with the 1915 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on plant pigments. After 1911 Willstatter returned to professorial posts in Germany. During World War I, he went into war work at the plea of his good friend Haber [977] and designed an effective gas mask. In 1916 he succeeded Baeyer as professor of chemistry at Munich. He interested himself in the 1920s in enzymes. It seemed to him that en zymes were not protein in nature (as most chemists suspected they were) for he purified enzyme solutions to the point where they still possessed catalytic prop erties and yet reacted negatively to the most delicate tests for protein. For ten years his views held sway in this respect but he was wrong, as was demonstrated by Sumner [1120] and Northrop [1148], Enzymes, it turned out, were protein. Willstatter resigned his professorial post at the University of Munich in 1925 in protest against the anti-Semitism in creasingly manifest there. With the com ing of Hitler in 1933 he remained in Germany, however, believing his place was there. His life was in continual dan ger, and in 1939, he recognized that to remain longer was suicide. He left for Switzerland in March of that year and there spent the last years of his life. [1010] DUGGAR, Benjamin Minge (dug'er)
American botanist Born: Gallion, Alabama, September 1, 1872 Died: New Haven, Connecticut, September 10, 1956 Duggar, the son of a country doctor, entered the University of Alabama at not quite fifteen. He obtained his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1898, then did further work in Germany and Italy. His great discovery came at a time when the average scientist is long retired. In 1948, when he was seventy-six years old, he discovered and introduced aureo mycin, the first of the tetracycline an tibiotics—a family that, next to penicillin perhaps, represents the most useful and least dangerous of the antibiotics. [1011] EULER-CHELPIN, Hans Karl August Simon von (oi'ler-khel'pin) German-Swedish chemist Born: Augsburg, Bavaria, Germany, February 15, 1873 Died: Stockholm, Sweden, November 7, 1964 Euler-Chelpin was the son of a Ger man army officer and was distantly re lated to Euler [275]. He was interested in painting, but he veered from that to chemistry. He graduated from the Uni versity of Berlin in 1895, where he stud ied under Planck [887] and Emil Fischer [833]. He then worked with Nemst [936] and afterward with Arrhenius [894] and Van’t Hoff [829]. In 1906 Euler-Chelpin left Germany to become a professor at the University of Stockholm and there he remained, retiring in 1941. He worked on enzymes, coenzymes, and vitamins, contributing to the deter mination of the structure of several of the vitamins. In particular, he was the first, through a line of experimentation beginning in 1923, to work out the struc ture of Harden’s [947] coenzyme. For this he shared with Harden the 1929 Nobel Prize in chemistry. 643 [1012] d ’ h é r e l l e LOEWI
[1015] [1012] D’HËRELLE, Félix Hubert (day- rel') Canadian-French bacteriologist Born: Montreal, Canada, April 25, 1873
Died: Paris, France, February 22, 1949
D’Hérelle was bom in Canada of a French father and a Dutch mother, and continued this French-Dutch combina tion by studying medicine at Paris and then at Leiden. While working at the Pasteur Institute in 1916, he was culturing bacteria when he noticed places in the culture where there were no bacteria. Something was destroying them. By 1917 he was con vinced he had discovered a vims that infested and destroyed bacterial cells. He called the virus “bacteriophage” (“bacte ria eater”). This had been noticed a little earlier by Twort [1055], but Twort did not fol low up on the discovery and D’Hérelle did. ‘
[1013] SIDGWICK, Nevil Vincent English chemist Bom: Oxford, May 8, 1873 Died: Oxford, March 15, 1952 Sidgwick was educated at Oxford and, except for some graduate work in Ger many (where, for a short time, he stud ied under Ostwald [840]), he remained at Oxford as a member of the faculty for all his professional life. He did his chief work in the 1920s on the electronic concept of valence. As ad vanced by Abegg [978] and Lewis [1037] it did not, even at its widest application, apply to Werner’s [960] coordination compounds. Sidgwick investigated this, making use of Bohr’s [1101] concept of the atom, and its electron shells, which had now been published. Sidgwick showed that the Lewis concept of elec tron sharing applied outside the realm of organic chemistry and, in particular, that the pair of shared electrons might both come from the same atom to form a coordinate bond. These coordinate bonds played a special role in coordina tion compounds and even in ordinary or ganic compounds at times when the ni trogen atom was involved. (Sidgwick had long specialized in the organic chemistry of nitrogen. His book on the subject, first published in 1910, was a classic and he expanded it into a bulky two-volume work in 1947.) [1014] BERGER, Hans German psychiatrist
Bavaria, May 21, 1873 Died: Jena, June 1, 1941 Berger, the grandson of a well-known German poet, gained his medical degree in 1897 and taught at the University of Jena from 1900. He was the first, in 1929, to devise a system of electrodes that, when applied to the skull and con nected to an oscillograph, would give a recording of the rhythmic shifting of electric potentials, commonly called brain waves. His first human subject in these experiments was his young son. He studied the rhythms, and labeled the most prominent as “alpha waves” and “beta waves.” Out of this discovery the technique of electroencephalography was bom. It has been useful in the diag nosis of epilepsy and it is quite possible that, with growing understanding of the brain, electroencephalography will yet serve as a guide to the fine workings of the nervous system. [1015] LOEWI, Otto (loi'vee) German-American physiologist Bom: Frankfurt-am-Main, June 3, 1873
Died: New York, New York, December 25, 1961 Loewi, the son of a wealthy Jewish wine merchant, studied medicine at the University of Strasbourg and obtained his medical degree there in 1896. There after he worked some years in London under Starling [954], In 1905 he went to Austria, where he held professorial posi tions first at the University of Vienna, 644 [1016] CARREL
CARREL [1016] then, after 1909, at the University of Graz. His chief work was in connection with nerve action. It had been known since the time of Galvani [320] over a century earlier that the nerve impulse was electri cal in nature. Loewi, however, demon strated that chemical phenomena were also involved. In 1921, working with the nerves attached to a frog’s heart, he showed that chemical substances were set free when the nerve was stimulated. The fluid containing the substance could be used to stimulate another heart directly without the intervention of nerve activity. The idea for the experiment occurred to him at 3 a . m . on two successive nights. The first night he wrote it down and went back to sleep. In the morning he could not read what he had written. The second night he went straight to his laboratory and got to work. By 5 a . m . he had established the point. Loewi called the substance he had dis covered Vagusstoff (“vagus material”) because he obtained it by stimulating the vagus nerve. The material was soon shown by Dale [1034] to be acetyl choline and, as a result, the two men, Loewi and Dale, shared the 1936 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology. Two years later Hitler’s Germany in vaded and absorbed Austria. Loewi was placed under arrest. Fearing death was inevitable, he managed to persuade a guard to allow him to mail a postcard to the scientific journal Naturwissenschaft
Fortunately death was avoided. He was allowed to leave the country provided he turn over his Nobel Prize money to the Nazis. He went first to England and in 1940 to the United States. There he joined the faculty of the New York University Col lege of Medicine, becoming an American citizen in 1946 and spending the remain der of his life in his new home. [1016] CARREL, Alexis (ka-reF) French-American surgeon
Carrel, the son of a textile manufac turer, who died when Alexis was five, studied at the University of Lyon and obtained his medical degree in 1900. He quickly proved himself a deft sur geon. He was inspired with interest in the field of blood-vessel repair by the as sassination, in 1894, of the French presi dent, Carnot (the nephew of Sadi Car not [497]). In that incident, the bullet severed a major artery and, conceivably, his life could have been saved if the ar tery had been quickly repaired. Carrel developed a technique whereby blood vessels could be delicately sutured, that is, sewn together end to end. He did this successfully in 1902, requiring as few as three stitches for the job. For some reason, however, he tempo rarily lost interest in the field and in 1904 went to Canada with the idea of becoming a cattle rancher. But science would not let him be and he went on to the United States. In 1906 he joined the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Re search (now Rockefeller University) in New York, remaining there until his re tirement in 1939. Carrel’s surgical research in his early years at Rockefeller was directed toward the replacement or transplantation of or gans. For this to be successful, it was necessary to insure a proper blood sup ply in an organ’s new location, and Car rel’s blood-vessel techniques were ex actly what was required. At about this time Landsteiner’s [973] discovery of blood groups had made blood transfusion practical, and such blood-vessel suturing was useful for the purpose. With the development of an ticoagulants, suturing proved unneces sary for transfusion, but it remained vital to many surgical operations which now became much more practical. Carrel was awarded the 1912 Nobel Prize in medi cine and physiology for this work. In itself, such suturing still did not make possible the transplantation or re placement of organs. However, Carrel then went on to attempt to keep organs or portions of organs alive by means of perfusion, that is, by passing blood or blood substitutes continuously through the organ by way of its own blood ves 645 [1017] DE FOREST DE FOREST
sels. He kept a piece of embryonic chicken heart alive and growing (it had to be periodically trimmed) for over thirty-four years—much longer than the normal life-span of a chicken—before the experiment was deliberately termi nated, and this appealed dramatically to public fancy. To make the process more efficient, he worked with Lindbergh [1249] in the early 1930s to design a perfusion pump that was germ-proof, a so-called “artificial heart.” Carrel served with the French army during World War I and devised an anti septic fluid, essentially a solution of so dium hypochlorite, that kept down the death rate from infected wounds. His ex periences in World War II were to be less happy. His philosophy as expressed in his book Man, the Unknown (published in 1935) was rather authoritarian and visu alized a world run by an intellectual elite. He was out of sympathy with west ern notions of democracy. He returned to France in 1939 just be fore the outbreak of World War II and during the opening year of the war was employed by the French government in the field of public health. France was defeated in 1940 and a portion of the nation was placed under the control of a government centered in the town of Vichy, one which was subservient to the Germans. Carrel seemed in sympathy with the Vichy government and worked for it.
When France was liberated, he was dismissed from his posts. He was not tried for “collaboration,” however. For one thing, he died within a matter of months. [1017] DE FOREST, Lee American inventor Born: Council Bluffs, Iowa, August 26, 1873 Died: Hollywood, California, June 30, 1961 De Forest grew up in Alabama, where his father, a minister, had come in 1879 to serve as a principal of a school for blacks. The family was, of course, os tracized for this crime and young Lee found his friends only among black chil dren. He did not seem to suffer unduly from this fact. De Forest’s father wanted him to enter the ministry, too, but the young man wanted science. He graduated from Yale in 1896 and obtained his Ph.D. in 1899, after some time spent in military service in the Spanish-American War, during which he saw no action. While yet at school, where he studied under Gibbs [740], he became interested in the new field of wireless telegraphy being opened up by Marconi [1025], In deed, his Ph.D. dissertation was probably the first in the United States to deal with radio waves. In 1901 he devised methods of speed ing up the transmission of wireless sig nals and his system was used in 1904 for the first instance of news reporting (of the Russo-Japanese War) in this manner. His greatest invention, however (and he had three hundred patents before he was done), was the triode. The Edison effect, noticed first by Edison [788], had been investigated by Fleming [803] and in 1904 made the basis of a rectifier. In 1906 De Forest inserted a third element, called the grid, making the instrument a triode (three electrodes) rather than a diode. The stream of electrons moved from the filament to the plate at a rate that varied markedly with the charge placed on the grid. A varying but very weak electric potential on the grid could be converted into a similarly varying but much stronger electron flow in the fila ment-plate combination. In De Forest’s hands Fleming’s instrument became an amplifier as well as a rectifier. The triode is the basis of the familiar radio tube, which made radios and a whole variety of electronic equipment practical by magnifying weak signals without distortion. In 1910 De Forest had taken Fessenden’s [958] system of broadcasting voice and used his triodes to broadcast the singing of Enrico Ca ruso. In 1916 he established a radio sta tion and was broadcasting news. In the end De Forest sold his radio tube (or audion as he called it) to
Download 17.33 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
|