Biographical encyclopedia
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651 [1028] BOSCH
KROGH [1030] contract pellagra by contact with the pa tients, their clothing, and their excre tions. They failed. Pellagra was not in fectious; it was a dietary deficiency dis ease. Goldberger spoke of a P-P factor (“pellagra-preventive”), but the vitamin involved was proved by Elvehjem [1240] to be nicotinic acid or, as it is also called, niacin. Cancer ended Goldberger’s unusual life; unusual even outside science, for in 1906 he had married a Gentile and made a happy (though rather impoverished) life of it. And this was at a time when mixed marriages of this sort were quite uncommon. [1028] BOSCH, Karl (boshe) German chemist
Bosch, the son of an engineer, ob tained his Ph.D. from the University of Leipzig in 1898, majoring in chemistry and studying under Wislicenus [716], He had training as an engineer, too. In 1909 he undertook the development of the Haber [977] process, turning it from a laboratory demonstration into an indus trial operation. For one thing, Haber had used a carbon-steel container for the re acting gases. This reacted with hydrogen and in time grew brittle and eventually, subjected as it was to high temperature and pressure, broke down. Bosch substi tuted alloy steel, which held up well. Under his direction a huge ammonia plant at Oppau was built and it was still under construction when World War I broke out. In 1931 he received the Nobel Prize in chemistry, along with Bergius [1098], not for having contributed so vi tally to the German war effort, of course, but for his investigations of the type of high-pressure reactions that made it possible to produce ammonia from nitrogen. It is important to re member that the Haber process (or “Haber-Bosch process,” as it is some times called) is as important to the pro duction of fertilizer as explosive. In 1935 he succeeded Planck [887] as head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Bosch managed to continue his work under the Nazi regime without bowing to Nazi principles (he openly honored Haber, for instance, after that man’s death in exile) and died before the hor rors of war turned back in full force upon Germany itself. [1029] BLAKESLEE, Albert Francis American botanist Born: Geneseo, New York, No vember 9, 1874 Died: Northampton, Massachu setts, November 16, 1954 Blakeslee obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1904. His important contri bution came in 1937 when, as director of the Carnegie Station for Experimental Evolution, he found that the alkaloid colchicine, obtained from the autumn crocus, can produce mutations in plants. To be sure, it does not do this by alter ing genes, as Muller’s [1145] X rays do; instead, it allows the chromosomes to double in number without allowing the cell itself to divide, so that cells are pro duced with multiple numbers of chromo somes (polyploidy). Nevertheless, this discovery did represent the first directly chemical interference with the mechanics of heredity. Other chemicals, such as ni trogen mustards, were soon discovered that produced mutations by inducing chemical changes within the chromo somes, so that the field of chemical mu tagens was opened wide. He retired in 1942 to a post at Smith College, which he held till his death. [1030] KROGH, Schack August Steen berg (krawg) Danish physiologist
15, 1874 Died: Copenhagen, September 13, 1949
Krogh, the son of a brewer, was edu cated at the University of Copenhagen, where he intended to study medicine but 6 5 2
[1031] WEIZMANN
WEIZMANN [1031] shifted his interest to physiology. He ob tained his master’s degree in 1899. He was particularly interested in the physical mechanisms involved in respira tion, following the path of oxygen, nitro gen, and carbon dioxide in and out of the body. In 1908 he gained a profes sorial position at the University of Co penhagen and there his studies of res piration led him to suggest that the capillaries (the tiniest blood vessels) of the muscles were open during muscular work and partially closed during rest. He went on to demonstrate this and to show the importance of such capillary control to the economy of the body. For this work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1920. He went on thereafter to show that this capillary control was brought about by the action of both muscles and hormones. After Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940, Krogh was forced to go underground and then to escape to Sweden. He remained there till the end of the war, then returned to liberated Denmark. [1031] WEISMANN, Chaim (vytse'- mahn) Russian-British-Israeli chemist Bom: Motol’ (near Pinsk), Rus sia, November 27, 1874 Died: Rehovoth, Israel, Novem ber 9, 1952 Weizmann, the son of a Jewish lumber transporter, journeyed to Germany for his higher education, obtaining his doc torate magna cum laude in 1900 at the University of Freiburg. He then lectured on chemistry at the University of Ge neva. In 1904 he went to England to join the faculty of the University of Man chester as a reader in biochemistry. En gland suited him and he remained, be coming a British subject in 1910. The coming of World War I put Great Britain (and all the warring nations, in fact) in dire need of explosives. Great Britain had nitrates available from Chile (as Germany had not), thanks to her control of the sea, but nitrates were not everything. Gunpowder, a mixture of carbon and inorganics, had given way to Dewar’s [759] cordite, which made use of organic nitrates that had to be synthe sized in quantity. Fortunately Great Britain’s new subject Weizmann had in 1911 discovered a way to put a particu lar strain of bacterium to work synthe sizing the compound acetone, in the course of its fermentation of grain. Ace tone supplied the essentials for the man ufacture of cordite. In peacetime the fermentation could be modified and made to yield butyl al cohol to use, for instance, in lacquers. Weizmann’s process was the forerunner of the deliberate use of microorganisms for a wide variety of syntheses. A gener ation later such compounds as penicillin and vitamin B12 were produced by mi croorganisms cultivated for the purpose. Thus, Weizmann relieved the British explosives pinch, while his fellow reli gionist Haber [977] was doing the same for Germany. Weizmann’s reward was quite different, however. He was a con vinced and fiery Zionist and it was partly owing to him that the British govern ment was induced to put forth the Bal four Declaration in 1917 agreeing to the reestablishment of a Jewish national state in Palestine. In 1919 he headed a Jewish delegation to the peace confer ence that followed World War I. From 1921 he was president of the World Zionist Organization and deeply involved with other organizations dedi cated to the establishment of such a state and to the consideration of the gathering problems of Jews everywhere. A genera tion was to pass—a tragic one that was to see bitter Arab-Jewish clashes in Pal estine as well as the barbarity of Hitler and his followers—before the Balfour Declaration was implemented. In 1932 he became president of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Then, in 1948, when the state of Israel was founded, Weizmann became its first president, though his age and poor health made it impossible to be very ac tive. Nevertheless, he remained in the 653 [1032] MONK
MICHAELIS [1033] post until his death. He was one of the very few research scientists ever to serve as head of a state. [1032] MONIZ, Antonio Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas (mawn'eess) Portuguese surgeon
1874
Died: Lisbon, December 13, 1955 Moniz received his early education from his uncle, a cleric. He went on to study medicine at the University of Coimbra, getting his degree in 1899, and was appointed to a professorial position there in 1902. In 1911 he became the first professor of neurology at the Uni versity of Lisbon. His chief interest in those years was in the visualization of the blood vessels, of the brain particu larly. He did this by injecting into the blood a substance opaque to X rays and then taking an X-ray photograph. Moniz was active in public affairs, serving a number of years in the Portu guese legislature prior to World War I and spending some time in prison after the revolution of 1908. He rose to the post of minister of foreign affairs in 1917 and led the Portuguese delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1918. After a duel in 1919, he retired from politics. His greatest fame came in connection with his interest in the foremost region of the brain, the prefrontal lobe. It had no clear-cut functions and was one of the so-called silent areas of the brain. It seemed reasonable to suppose that it served as one of the coordinating centers in the brain, an area where associations were made, where routes, so to speak, were set up among the nerve cells accu mulating life’s experiences and thoughts. It seemed to Moniz that where a men tal patient was at the end of his rope, and ordinary psychiatry and ordinary physical therapy did not help, it might be possible simply to sever the prefron tal lobes and cut the patient off from some of the nerve patterns he had built up. They might very well be undesirable and pathological ones and their loss might be to the good. The operation was first carried through in 1935 and in a number of cases it did seem to help. Moniz had, in this manner, opened a new field of medi cal specialization, that of psychosurgery, and he was awarded a share of the 1949 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology as a result. The operation has, however, remained a last resort and has never gained more than a very limited popular ity. It virtually died out after the discov ery of tranquilizers and other drugs which could be used to treat emotional disturbances. [1033] MICHAELIS, Leonor (mih-khah- ay'lis) German-American chemist Born: Berlin, Germany, January 16, 1875 Died: New York, New York, Oc tober 9, 1949 Michaelis obtained his medical degree at the University of Berlin in 1896 and for a while thereafter worked under Ehr lich [845], developing useful cell stains. His chief interest lay in the application of physical chemical principles to bio chemical reactions. For instance, he dealt with the variations in hydrogen ion concentration (which, at about that time, was reduced to an elegant repre sentation by Sørensen [967]) and the influence of those variations on reac tions. Virtually all reactions in living tissue are catalyzed by enzymes and it was the still mysterious enzymes that Michaelis turned to. Kühne [725] had given them a name a generation before, but their ac tual nature remained unknown for a quarter century to come because Will- stätter [1009] made a wrong decision in that connection. Michaelis, however, did not care what an enzyme was as long as he could un derstand how it worked. He applied the rules of chemical kinetics (a branch of physical chemistry dealing with the rates of reactions) and in 1913 evolved an 6 5 4
[1034] DALE
J u n o
[1035] equation that seemed to describe how the rate of an enzyme-catalyzed reaction varied with the concentration of the sub stance taking part in the reaction. This is called the Michaelis-Menten equation after himself and his assistant. To work out this equation he postu lated the formation of a union between the enzyme and the reacting substance prior to the reaction, a union for which no direct evidence existed for nearly an other half century. The equation took the curse off en zymes, in a manner of speaking. They were brought down from the status of a mysterious name and nothing more to a level where at least they were amenable to the same mathematical treatments that ordinary chemicals were—and therefore, presumably, were ordinary chemicals. In 1929 Michaelis went to the United States, where he remained for the rest of his life. Of lesser importance to science than his enzyme work, but of more im mediate importance to practical life was his discovery that keratin is soluble in thioglycolic acid. Keratin is the chief constituent of hair and the discovery opened the way to the development of the home permanent. [1034] DALE, Sir Henry Hallett English biologist Born: London, June 9, 1875 Died: Cambridge, July 23, 1968 Dale, the son of a businessman, gradu ated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1898 and, after considerable hesitation as to the direction he wished his life to take, he earned his medical degree at Cambridge in 1909. Earlier he had worked under Starling [954] and had, at that time, met Loewi [1015]. In his work on a fungus called ergot during the 1910s Dale isolated a com pound called acetylcholine. Dale’s studies showed that it produced effects on or gans similar to those brought about by nerves that belonged to the parasym pathetic system. Once he heard of Loewi’s Vagusstoff it was possible to show that this was acetylcholine. Dale was knighted in 1932 and shared in the 1936 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology with Loewi. Between 1940 and 1945 he served as president of the Royal Society. [1035] JUNG, Carl Gustav (yoong) Swiss psychiatrist
26, 1875 Died: Kiisnacht, near Zürich, June 6, 1961 The son of a clergyman, Jung found his early interest in archaeology. Medi cine was only his second choice. After obtaining his medical degree at Zürich in 1902, he worked in a mental hospital where he had more opportunity to study psychotic states than Freud [865] ever had. In 1906 he began to develop word- association tests, which, by forcing a per son to make a quick response, tapped the unconscious mind before the con scious mind could raise a protective wall. In 1907 he met Freud, whose early works he had read, and for a few years he was an enthusiastic disciple of the older man. By 1912 he too, like Adler [984] before him, had broken away. He thought Freud’s explanations in terms of infantile sexuality were adequate perhaps for neuroses like hysteria, but inadequate for more serious disorders such as schizophrenia, in which Jung was partic ularly interested at the time. Jung’s interest in archaeology and primitive myths reflected itself in the for mulation of the term “collective uncon scious.” The child is born with a mind containing an imprint from quite primi tive times; the deeper unconscious levels can be interpreted in terms of mythol ogy, which has been created out of just such levels in the past. His theories are more difficult to understand than those of Freud and Adler and his influence has been correspondingly smaller. He popu larized the concepts “introvert” and “ex trovert.” He became professor of psychology at the Federal Polytechnic University in Zürich in 1933 and shifted to Basel in 655 [1036] SHERMAN
LEWIS [1037] 1943. In this period, many of his re marks, filled with vague Teutonishness, gave rise to suspicions that he was pro Nazi. [1036] SHERMAN, Henry Clapp American biochemist Born: Ash Grove, Virginia, Octo ber 16, 1875 Died: Rensselaer, New York, Oc tober 7, 1955 Sherman obtained his doctorate at Co lumbia University in 1895 and served on Columbia’s faculty thereafter. His pri mary interest was in nutrition and through the early decades of the century he studied the calcium and phosphorus requirements of the body, as McCollum [1062] was also doing. Sherman showed that both were needed in an appropriate ratio and that rickets could be induced on a low-phosphorus diet even when cal cium was more than ample. His most important work lay in the development of quantitative biological methods for assaying the vitamin content of food. Beginning with an animal on a basic diet, complete but for a particular vitamin, he measured its rate of growth as various foods were added to the diet. That rate of growth was a measure of the quantity of the excluded missing vi tamin in each food. [1037] LEWIS, Gilbert Newton American chemist Born: West Newton, Massa chusetts, October 25, 1875 Died: Berkeley, California, March 23, 1946 Lewis, the intellectually precocious son of a lawyer, moved with his family to Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1884 and began his college career at the University of Nebraska, then transferred to Harvard in 1895. He obtained his doctorate at the latter institution in 1899, working under Richards [968]. He then spent a year in the Philippines and went through the usual course of advanced studies in Ger many, studying under Ostwald [840] and Nemst [936]. He joined the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1905, and in 1912 he accepted a post on the faculty of the University of Califor nia, where he remained till his death. There he introduced thermodynamics into the curriculum in the early decades of the twentieth century. Furthermore, a textbook he wrote with Merle Randall, entitled Thermodynamics and the Free
lished in 1923, became the undoubted classic in the field. More than any other single book, this introduced, clarified, and expanded Gibbs’s [740] chemical thermodynamics for the benefit of the student of chemistry. In the book Lewis introduced a variety of new concepts in cluding that of “activity,” which was more useful in working out rates of reac tions and questions of equilibria than was the older “concentration.” It modified and made more accurate, for instance, Guldberg [721] and Waage’s [701] law of mass action. Meanwhile, the “nuclear atom” con cept introduced by Ernest Rutherford [996] cried out for application to the question of atomic valence. The visuali zation by Kekulé [680] and Couper [686] of valence bonds as short dashes begged the question as to the nature of those bonds. In 1904 Abegg [978] was the first to try to explain valence bonds in terms of electrons, but his explanation applied only to the simple electrolytes. In 1916 Lewis tried to relate the elec trons of the atom to the nonelectrolytic links present in organic compounds. He suggested that a bond between two ele ments could be formed not only through the transfer of electrons, as in Abegg’s view, but through the sharing of elec trons. Each bond in organic compounds represented the sharing of one pair of electrons, the final result being that all atoms achieved the stable electronic configuration of the inert gas atom. Simi lar notions were independently advanced by Langmuir [1072]. Sidgwick [1013] advanced the thesis still further, and a generation after Abegg’s first attempt Pauling [1236] combined the electronic 6 5 6
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