Biographical encyclopedia
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691 [1088] HESS
WARBURG [1089] electroscopes, as high as six miles. (Elec troscopes are simple instruments in which two gold leaves or, better still, two quartz fibers, both electrically charged, repel each other. Where radiation ionizes the air within the electroscope, the charge is carried off and the leaves or fibers slowly come together. From the rate of coming together the quantity of ionization, and therefore of radiation, can be measured.) He made ten balloon ascents himself, five of them at night. The balloon experiments were sup posed to show that a shielded electro scope was less affected in the heights, away from the radioactivity of the soil. Hess, however, found to his surprise that at these great heights, the radiation was markedly greater, up to eight times as great, in fact, as at the surface of the earth. Others had observed this too, but Hess was the first to take the results at face value and suggest that the radiation came from outer space. Millikan [969] named the radiation “cosmic rays.” Cosmic rays were important not only for the information they gave, or might give, concerning astrophysical processes and the history of the universe, but also for the fact that they represented a par ticularly concentrated form of energy. Cosmic rays formed new particles, there fore, which could be encountered, until very recently, in no other way. It was during cosmic-ray research, for instance, that Anderson [1292] discovered the pos itron and Powell [1274] the pi-meson. Hess received the 1936 Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery, sharing it with Anderson. Shortly before Hitler’s absorption of Austria, Hess who, though himself a Catholic, had a Jewish wife, saw what was to come and emigrated first to Swit zerland and then to the United States. In 1938 he joined the faculty of Fordham University (where he stayed until his re tirement in 1956) and in 1944 became an American citizen. After World War II, he was deeply en gaged in the measurement of radioactive fallout from nuclear bombs. He was one of those nuclear physicists who strongly opposed nuclear tests. [1089] WARBURG, Otto Heinrich (wahr'boorg) German biochemist Born: Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Baden, October 8, 1883 Died: Berlin-Dahlem, August 1, 1970
Warburg, the son of a physics profes sor, studied chemistry under Emil Fischer [833] and obtained his doctorate in 1906 with work on polypeptides, which at that time was Fischer’s absorb ing interest. Warburg turned toward medicine, however, obtaining his medical degree in 1911, and thereafter concen trated on tissue respiration. During World War I, Warburg served as an officer on the Russian front and was wounded in action. The problem of respiration had taken on its modern form a century and a quarter earlier when Lavoisier [334] had demonstrated the nature of combustion and argued that respiration, like combus tion, was an oxidation requiring the free oxygen of the air. Hemoglobin was later found to carry the oxygen to the cells, but what did the oxygen do there? The details were missing. Warburg in 1923 devised a method for preparing thin slices of still-respiring tis sue and measuring the uptake of oxygen by the decrease in pressure in a small flask, this decrease being determined by the change in level of a fluid in a thin U- shaped tube attached to the flask. Car bon dioxide was absorbed by a small well of alkaline solution within the flask. Such a Warburg manometer to which Warburg flasks were attached proved a powerful tool for studying respiration. Through his studies in 1925 and after ward, Warburg began to suspect that a group of enzymes called cytochromes were involved in the reactions that con sumed oxygen within the cells. These had been detected by their absorption of light a generation earlier. Observing that carbon monoxide molecules attached themselves to the cytochromes, Warburg further suspected that they contained iron atoms. Indeed, they eventually proved to contain heme groups of the type present in hemoglobin. The heme
[1089] WARBURG
WARBURG [1089] groups of hemoglobin carried the oxygen to the cells, in other words, and the heme groups of the cytochromes (pro teins quite distinct from the one forming part of hemoglobin) grasped the oxygen and put it to work. For this new insight into the details of respiration, Warburg was awarded the 1931 Nobel Prize in medicine and physi ology. There was still the question, however, of what exactly the oxygen did when it was “put to work.” It was coming to be known that the small molecules absorbed after digestion (glucose and fatty acids, for instance) lost hydrogen atoms, two at a time, and that these were attached to oxygen atoms to form water. Some biochemists, notably Wieland [1048], believed that it was these dehydrogena tions that were the key reactions, the ones catalyzed by enzymes, and that the role of oxygen was rather minor. War burg held out for his oxygen activation by enzymes in a Homeric battle that both sides won, for both sides were right. Enzymes controlled both the dehydro genations and the oxidations. Warburg went on to study the dehy drogenation reactions during the 1930s. He isolated a flavoenzyme, for instance, which, in addition to protein, contained a molecular grouping that eventually proved to be very similar to one of the vitamins. He also worked with coenzyme I, Harden’s [947] coenzyme, and helped show its similarity to what proved to be another vitamin, Goldberger’s [1027] P-P factor, in fact. Before the end of the decade, work like this had helped clarify the actual functioning of the vitamins. They were no longer merely mysterious trace essentials in food as they had seemed all through the generation since Eijkman [888]. They were components of enzymes, portions of catalysts control ling important metabolic actions. Warburg bent his method of studying respiration to the attack on cancer. In the heyday of Koch’s [767] exploitation of Pasteur’s [642] germ theory of dis ease, it had been believed that all dis eases, cancer included, were caused by germs. With the advancement of the vi tamin concept by Hopkins [912] and the hormone concept by Starling [954], it came to be realized that serious diseases could arise from flaws and shortcomings in the mechanisms of body chemistry (the body’s metabolism, in other words) without assistance from outside. Since no germ could be found that caused cancer and since cancer did not seem to be con tagious, the view grew in the first few decades of the twentieth century that it too was a disease of metabolism. To be sure, Rous [1067] had located a tumor virus but even he scarcely dared mention the word “virus” in connection with can cer. Warburg studied the respiratory mech anisms of cancerous tissue as opposed to normal tissue and found that oxygen up take was distinctly less in the former. Tissue can extract energy by the dehy drogenation of substances without the use of molecular oxygen. This is inefficient and only a temporary device where oxygen cannot be supplied in sufficient quantity, as when muscles are laboring under an intense workload. Such oxygen-free respiration, which had been noted in yeast by Pasteur over half a century before, is called glycolysis. Cancer tissue, then, tends to glycolyze more than normal tissue does. Warburg’s work on cancer made it possible for him to survive in Nazi Ger many despite the fact that he was half Jewish. In 1941 he was removed from his post but Hitler (who feared the pos sibility of throat cancer) personally or dered him back to cancer research. How ever, when in 1944 it seemed he might be nominated for a second Nobel Prize, the chance fell through, for Nazi policy at the time forbade Germans to accept such prizes. Warburg’s discoveries unfortunately did not lead to a breakthrough on the cancer problem. Little else of signifi cance has been discovered about the distinctive metabolic pattern of cancer cells in the generation since Warburg’s discovery. In fact, even the question of the cause of cancer grew puzzling as the connection with viruses was out lined more clearly by men like Bittner [1277].
693 [1090] SMITH
PICCARD [1092] [1090] SMITH, Philip Edward American endocrinologist
January 1, 1884 Died: Florence, Massachusetts, December 8, 1970 Smith, the son of a minister, attended Pomona College in California (where his family had moved when he was six) and graduated in 1908 at the head of his class. He did his graduate work at Cor nell University, getting his Ph.D. in his tology in 1912. During his graduate work he grew interested in the pituitary gland. He retained that interest all his working life. He demonstrated the overriding im portance of the pituitary. He developed methods for removing the pituitary with out any damage to the brain and showed that such “hypophysectomy” resulted in the cessation of growth and the atrophy of other endocrine glands, such as the thyroid, the adrenal cortex, and the re productive glands. During the 1920s he had professorial positions, first at the University of Cali fornia, then Stanford, and then Colum bia. [1091] ANDREWS, Roy Chapman American zoologist Born: Beloit, Wisconsin, January 26, 1884 Died: Carmel, California, March 11, 1960 Andrews was educated at Beloit Col lege, graduating in 1906 and joining the staff of the American Museum of Natu ral History in New York that same year. One of his first jobs was to bring in the skeleton of a dead whale beached on Long Island. For a decade he concerned himself with whales and whaling. He then became interested in fossils and beginning in 1916 scoured the far reaches of the world for them. His expe ditions into the little-known depths of central Asia resulted in his most dra matic find—fossilized dinosaur eggs. This, more than any single discovery, seemed to lend life to these reptilian monsters. He also discovered fossil bones of the Baluchitherium (“beast of Baluchistan,” where the bones were discovered), the largest known land mammal ever to have lived. Its shoulders were as high in the air as the head of a tall giraffe. Andrews was director of the American Museum of Natural History from 1935 until his retirement in 1942. [1092] PICCARD, Auguste (pee-kahr') Swiss physicist Born: Basel, January 28, 1884 Died: Lausanne, March 24, 1962 Auguste Piccard was one of a pair of twins (the other was Jean Félix) bom to the head of the department of chemistry at the University of Basel. Piccard stud ied mechanical engineering at Zürich, while his twin brother studied chemical engineering. Both earned doctoral de grees and achieved professorial ranks. Auguste collaborated with Einstein [1064] in the design of instruments for electrical measurements. In 1922 he joined the faculty of the Polytechnic In stitute in Brussels, Belgium, where he remained until his retirement in 1954. Piccard was interested in cosmic rays and the ion-filled layers of the upper at mosphere and he was anxious to explore the high reaches. A half century before, man had climbed, as far as he could safely manage, in balloons equipped with open gondolas. Since then, thanks mainly to the initiative of Teisserenc de Bort [861], instrumented but unmanned balloons had been used. Piccard was dissatisfied with this situa tion. It occurred to him that if one built a sealed aluminum gondola, a man could live comfortably in it at any height to which the balloon could carry him, and manned observations (always superior, somehow, to unmanned ones, however sophisticated the instrumentation) would be possible. In 1931 he and a fellow aeronaut, Paul Küpfer, rose from Augs burg, Germany, to an altitude of 51,775 feet in an eighteen-hour flight. This flight, to a height of nearly ten miles, was half again as high as man had ever risen before and marked the first pene 694 [1092] PICCARD
FUNK [1093] tration of the stratosphere by a human being. In the United States in 1932 Pic card made another and somewhat higher flight with his twin brother. He made twenty-seven balloon ascensions alto gether before he retired from this line of work.
Piccard’s pioneering paved the way for still more remarkable feats once balloons came to be made out of new plastic ma terials which were at once lighter than the older materials and less permeable to helium. The American balloon Explorer II reached an altitude of 72,395 feet (13% miles) in 1935 and by the de cade of the 1960s, heights of 101,000 feet (19 miles) had been attained. By then, however, rocketry had come into its own and manned rocket flights had carried human beings 150 miles, and more, above the earth’s surface. Having penetrated the stratosphere, Piccard restlessly aimed his energies in the opposite direction. He had met Beebe [1050] at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair and that had sparked him. In the late 1930s he designed a ship that could be maneuvered in the great depths. This bathyscaphe (“ship of the deep”) was designed something like a dirigible. The upper portion was a cigar-shaped float, containing gasoline to give the ves sel buoyancy. The lower portion was a steel sphere something like Beebe’s bathysphere. For the bathyscaphe to sink, it is only necessary to fill a couple of tanks in the float with sea water. The bathyscaphe carries tons of small iron pellets, which can be jettisoned gradually to slow a de scent or to bring about an ascent. World War II intervened. Work on the first bathyscaphe was not begun until 1946 and the ship was not completed until 1948. It was tested thoroughly, and in 1954 two French naval officers de scended to a depth of 13,287 feet (2% miles) off the Mediterranean coast of Africa. It set a new record, since it pene trated more than four times deeper than Beebe had a quarter century earlier. Piccard built a second bathyscaphe,
States Navy in 1948. On January 23, 1960, with two men aboard (one of them Piccard’s son), the Trieste de scended into the Marianas Trench, about two hundred and ten miles southwest of Guam in the Marianas Islands. This was the deepest known spot in the Pacific, thought to be at 33,600 feet. The Trieste reached a bottom even lower than that, dropping down to 35,800 feet (6% miles) below sea level. Thus, the ocean depths have been sounded by man prob ably close to the very limit, and until man learns to penetrate the crust itself to great depths, no human being can better this mark. [1093] FUNK, Casimir (foonk) Polish-American biochemist
of Russia), February 23, 1884 Died: New York, New York, November 20, 1967 Funk, the son of a physician, was educated in various places in western Europe, obtaining his doctor’s degree in 1904 at the University of Berne in Swit zerland. He worked in Paris, Berlin, and London, but came to the United States in 1915 and was naturalized in 1920. He returned to Poland in 1923 to ac cept the directorship of the State Insti tute of Hygiene in Warsaw but when World War II broke out in 1939, he came to the United States for good. In 1912 Funk once again advanced the concept, earlier proposed by Hopkins [912], that diseases such as beriberi, scurvy, pellagra, and rickets were caused by lack of substances that were needed in the diet in small quantities. He suggested a name for these sub stances, a name that arose as follows. His investigation of Eijkman’s [888] anti beriberi factor had shown him that it was an amine; that is, that it contained the amine group (—NH2) in its mole cule. Funk erroneously supposed that all similar substances were amines and so he named the factors vitamines (“life- amine”). When some years later it turned out that not all the factors were amines, the final “e” was dropped and the word became “vitamin.” In the same year, Funk isolated nico tinic acid in rice polishings, but finding
[1094] DEBYE
MEYERHOF [1095] that it did not counter beriberi he let it go. It was left to men like Warburg [1089] and Elvehjem [1240] to discover its importance in connection with pella gra.
[1094] DEBYE, Peter Joseph Wilhelm (dee-bigh') Dutch-American physical chemist
March 24, 1884 Died: Ithaca, New York, Novem ber 2, 1966 Debye’s training at the University of Aachen was originally in the field of electrical engineering. He received a de gree in that subject in 1905. However, he turned to physics and in 1910 re ceived his Ph.D. at the University of Munich, working under Sommerfeld [976], He accepted a professorship in theoretical physics at the University of Zürich in 1911, succeeding Einstein [1064] in that post. Later he taught at the universities of Leipzig and Berlin. His fields merged in a way, however, for his first important work was in a the oretical treatment of dipole moments, which measure the effect of an electrical field on the orientation of those mole cules that carry a positive electric charge on one portion of their structure and a negative one on another. (The unit of dipole moment is called a debye in his honor.)
In 1916 Debye extended the work of the Braggs [922, 1141] and showed that X-ray analysis could be used not only for intact crystals but also for powdered solids, which were mixtures of tiny crys tals oriented in all possible directions. Most spectacularly, perhaps, Debye extended the work of Arrhenius [894] on ionic dissociation in solution. According to Arrhenius, electrolytes (including most inorganic salts) dissociated into positively and negatively charged ions, when dissolved, but the dissociation was not necessarily complete. Debye, on the other hand, maintained that most salts (such as sodium chloride, for instance) had to ionize completely, since X-ray analysis showed that they existed in ionic form in the crystal before ever they were dissolved. He suggested, however, that each positive ion was attended by a cloud of ions in which the negatively charged ones were preponderant, while each negative ion was attended by a cloud of predominantly positive ones. Each type of ion suffered a braking “drag” for which the ions of opposite charge were responsible and this made the solution seem incompletely ionized when it wasn’t. He worked out the math ematics representing the phenomenon in 1923 and the so-called Debye-Huckel theory (named for himself and a col league) is the key to the modern inter pretation of the properties of solutions. Debye received the 1936 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on dipolar mo ments in particular. In 1935 Debye had become director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics at Berlin (which he renamed the Max Planck Institute), but his position during World War II became increasingly difficult. In 1939 the Nazi government ordered him to become a German citizen. He re fused and returned to the Netherlands. In 1940, just two months before his na tive land was invaded by Hitler’s armies, he left for the United States to deliver a guest lecture at Cornell University. There he stayed, taking up a position as professor of chemistry and head of the department at Cornell University, re maining until his retirement in 1952. He became an American citizen in 1946. [1095] MEYERHOF, Otto Fritz (my'er- hofe) German-American biochemist Born: Hannover, April 12, 1884 Died: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 6, 1951 Meyerhof, the son of a Jewish mer chant, obtained his medical degree at the University of Heidelberg in 1909. He was interested in psychology and psychi atry at first, but a meeting with Warburg [1089] drew him toward physiology and biochemistry. In 1918 he joined the fac ulty of the University of Kiel and de voted himself to the biochemistry of muscle.
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