Is there a Bottom Line
Von Verschuer's scientific record and his scientific career are deeply disturbing. Equally disturbing is the disinterest of his colleagues in this past. A scientific community which is unable to face its own crimes, and which prefers to look constantly away, works towards its own destruction. It is late but not too late. Von Verschuer was the director of a KW Institute and thus belongs to the history of the MPG. The documents which I present show unambiguously that von Verschuer considered...
Automation Must Come
In 1957 Pehr Edman accepted an offer as Director of Research at the newly established St. Vincent's School of Medical Research in Melbourne where he would remain for 15 years and became an Australian citizen. The reasons for his leaving Sweden were rather complex. Pehr Edman's time at the biochemistry department in Lund had not been altogether happy, possibly because of personal frictions. Also, his scientific endeavor was apart from the mainstream scientific aims of the department. Few were...
Bacteriorhodopsin W Stoeckenius and E Racker
In January of 1973, I had a talk at a Bioenergetics conference organized by David Green in the New York Academy of Sciences. After the talk, somebody approached me saying that he has interesting information. This was Walter Stoeckenius, an electron microscopist involved in studies on membrane ultrastructure. We came to his room in the Americana Hotel where Stoeckenius put many figures on the table and bed. After an hour of conversation, it became clear for me that my new acquaintance had...
Phageinduced tRNA
Early studies of RNA synthesis in E. coli cells showed that after infection with a T-even bacteriophage, there was a rapid incorporation of 32P-orthophosphate into RNA. While most of the labeled RNA synthesized after infection was phage-specific mRNA, it was noticed by Sol Spiegelman and his colleagues that some eight percent were found as a low molecular weight RNA fraction. Because of this finding, we attempted to characterize this 4S RNA fraction and determine whether it has amino acid...
Uppsala 19611966
The professor of medical and physiological chemistry in Uppsala, Gunnar Blix, was due to retire in 1961 and there was a lack of senior investigators in the department. Therefore, my friend Lennart Roden, who lived in Stockholm, held the position as docent associate professor and commuted to Uppsala. Lennart saw a possibility of getting me to Uppsala and convinced Gunnar Blix that he should propose an established inves-tigatorship of ophthalmic biochemistry in the Swedish Medical Research...
Behind the Fraud
It is worth noting that Abderhalden was a convinced eugenicist. Given that his main scientific activity was based on self-deception and fraud, it is interesting that between 1922 and 1935 he edited a journal about ethics Ethik . He wrote a textbook of biochemistry that appeared in 28 editions between 1906 and 1948 and was translated into four languages. He was president of the Leopoldina Academy from 1931 to 1950. After 1933, the notes membership ended'' or membership extinguished'' were...
Letters Exchanged between Butenandt and Von Verschuer September 1944September
How did the collaboration von Verschuer-Butenandt-Hillmann get started The simplest explanation is that Von Verschuer told his neighbor Butenandt, their villas in Dahlem were next to each other, of his project. Perhaps they met for lunch in the Harnack-house closeby. Then Butenandt may have told von Verschuer, that he had a collaborator, Hillmann, who was an expert in the test of defense enzymes. In the first letter of Von Verschuer Berlin to Butenandt T bingen , collaboration is mentioned as...
Membrane Potential Revealed by Penetrating Ions
Elucidation of the protonophorous mechanism of uncoupling directly confirmed one of the crucial postulates of the chemi-osmotic hypothesis. The next piece of evidence in favor of this concept was obtained when we tested Mitchell's assumption that respiratory and photosynthetic electron carriers, as well as membranous ATPases, generate transmembrane difference in electric potentials A 63,66 . To this end, we decided to find artificial ions penetrating through biomembranes. By definition,...
From Weismann to Apoptosis
More than 120 years ago, the great German biologist August Weismann put forward a paradoxical idea that death due to aging was invented by evolution as an adaptive mechanism. For the first time, this concept was presented in his lecture to a meeting of the Association of German Naturalists in September, 1881. The hypothesis was published in German 1882 and then in English l889 . Weismann wrote There cannot be the least doubt, that the higher organisms, as they are now constructed, contain...
Cohn and Edsall
My undergraduate thesis in chemistry and my PhD thesis in physical chemistry both focussed on the mechanism of interaction of small molecules in the gaseous state - on combustion in a burner flame, in the case of my PhD dissertation. The Tanford-Pease theory of burning velocity'' was briefly in the limelight, before more elegant theories took its place 1 . My first exposure to proteins and a huge transition from what I had been doing at Princeton came when I went to Harvard, to the medical...
Birth of an Idea
Let us start with some historical remarks. Traditionally, proteins were regarded as biocolloids in the 19th century and few people supposed that any protein preparation contained identical molecules. At the end of the 19th century, Olof Hammarsten in Uppsala isolated fibrinogen out of horse4 plasma 4 . This clotting protein was one of the first proteins to be isolated in pure form it appeared to be a homogeneous component on the basis of being almost completely transformed into fibrin by...
Back in Stockholm 19541958
From now on Ulla concentrated on finishing her MD while I went back to the Chemistry Department to continue my graduate studies interwoven with some medical courses. My further work took two directions. First, Bertil Jacobson wanted to pursue his idea that DNA and hyaluronan surrounded themselves with large icelike hydration shells and to prove this by X-ray diffraction. He built X-ray cameras to record the amorphous diffractograms from water solutions of these polymers and I did the...
Establishing a Research Career Retina Foundation 19591961
Equipped with immigration visa, we flew in the beginning of January in a slow propeller plane to New York. The Retina Foundation had grown since our last stay. Claes-Henrik Dohlman, a Swedish corneal surgeon whom we knew since our last visit in Boston, had brought two of his colleagues from Sweden, Arvid Anseth and Bengt Hedbys. Claes-Henrik shared his time between clinical work at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and basic research on the cornea at the Retina Foundation. As mentioned...
Molecular Evolution Development from Early Diagonals over the Atlas Issues to
With the availability of primary structures in the 1960s, I, like many others, started to do comparisons. Gradually, they grew more and more sophisticated, and these developments have formed part of my life, much like the chemical protein analyses have. Once I had the first ADH primary structure horse EE form , and small parts of some others yeast, the horse ES form and a human and a rat form , two things became apparent 1 the isoforms were closely related and constituted an isozyme family, and...
Interaction with Industry
Although as a principle I have tried to keep my activities within the academic world, it has sometimes been necessary to act also in the commercial area. As mentioned above I had a lot of experience from scientific collaboration with colleagues employed at the drug company Pharmacia. The introduction of hyaluronan in eye surgery around 1980 created a dramatic boost for Pharmacia, which was both positive and negative. On the positive side was the increase in research and development, on the...
Genetic Basis for Antibody Diversity
It was not possible in the 1960s to be involved with immunoglo-bulins without being aware that there was a more important unsolved problem than that of molecular shape. At that time it was still generally believed that the general axiom of protein chemistry, that amino sequence uniquely determines three-dimensional structure and thereby function, did not apply to antibodies - it was thought implausible that the huge number of distinct immunological specificities that were known to exist could...
Science Takes Hold
After the matriculation examination, Pehr Edman decided to study medicine and therefore applied to the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, a medical school. He started his medical studies in 1935 and received a bachelor of medicine degree in 1938. He graduated as a physician in 1946. During his studies at the Karolinska Institutet, he joined a socialist political organization, Clarte.3 Several Swedish intellectuals, politicians, and artists were its members. Tage Erlander, who later became...
Project I Genetic Defects in Families and Twins
On December 16,1942, two weeks before Mengele turned up at the Berlin-Dahlem Institute, Himmler had given the general order that all Gypsies, with the exception of a very few racially pure families, ought to be transferred to Auschwitz. A detailed order was given on January 29,1943. Before, most German Gypsies had been held in various camps. The Gypsies had been an object of study for students and post-docs of von Verschuer and Fischer. In particular Dr Georg Wagner, a graduate student working...
End of Journey
In the early 1970s, Pehr Edman accepted an offer to be Director of the Department of Protein Chemistry I of the Max Planck Institut fur Biochemie in Martinsried, near Munich. He and his wife Agnes Henschen moved there in 1972. During the last years of his life, he continued his work on the sequenator with the main objective of improving the yields. He was of the opinion that high repetitive yields are crucial in stepwise sequencing and that all efforts must be directed toward this goal. The...
The First Ten Years in Cologne 19681977
In the morning of April 18, 1968, I arrived in Cologne airport with my wife Barbara, a cat in a box, and two pieces of luggage. In the afternoon, I gave my first lecture on bacterial genetics in front of five students. Barbara, the cat, and I stayed in the guest room on the sixth floor of the institute, until we found a beautiful apartment in an old house in the center of Cologne. I still live in this place. To return to Germany was not easy. This country haunted me. Directly after my return, I...
Pehr Victor Edman The Solitary Genius
Karolinska Institutet, Fogdevreten 2A, Stockholm, SE-171 77, Sweden One of the main problems in protein chemistry half a century ago was how to efficiently elucidate the sequence of amino acids in proteins. With laborious methods, only small protein structures had so far been resolved. For insulin, the most famous example, the sequence of its 51 amino acid residues took a decade to unravel. Entertaining the thought of establishing the amino acid sequences for protein molecules with hundreds or...
Service on General Medical and Dental Councils
In the period from 1967 until my move to Oxford in 1975, I had represented the University of Bristol Medical School on the General Medical Council GMC . I also served on the General Dental Council but had relatively less to contribute as my knowledge of dentistry was minimal. The GMC had two roles - it was responsible for maintaining standards in medical education and ensuring up-to-date curricula in medical schools and it was responsible for maintaining standards in medical practice i.e. it...
Edman The Person
I believe that most people who met Pehr Edman for the first time got the impression of a courteous, kind but also reclusive man with a hint of shyness. There was, in his personality, a certain aloofness, which people who did not know him may mistakenly have taken for snobbishness. People who came closer to him could fully appreciate other qualities generosity, warmth, humor, and sympathy. 15Many scientists have asked me why Pehr Edman never got the Nobel Prize. Considering the importance of his...
AN Belozersky Bioenergetics a Department in MSU and a Branch of Biological
I liked Mitchell's hypothesis since it gave a chance to explain the mechanism of the thermoregulatory uncoupling as well as other numerous cases when respiration occurs without phosphorylation. However, I proceeded to its verification only five years after its publication. Such a delay was due, first of all, to that I tried to exhaust possibilities of an alternative adenine hypothesis. Moreover, the period between 1960 and 1965 was overcrowded by events only indirectly related to science or...
The Student Year SE Severin and VA Engelhardt
In the second year, I joined the famous seminar at the Department of Biochemistry chaired by the Head of the Department Professor Sergey Eugenyevich Severin and Professor Vladimir Alexandrovich Engelhardt. The latter name is well known in the West because of his two most famous discoveries, namely, oxidative phosphorylation early 1930s and ATPase activity of myosin middle 1940s . On the other hand, S.E. Severin was less popular abroad although in the USSR his contribution was well recognized he...
Chemistry Department 19511953
Hjalmar Holmgren was seriously ill with cancer at the time when Bandi left Sweden, and he died a few months later. His research group dissolved. A virologist working in Holmgren's laboratory had a friend in the Chemistry Department, Bertil Jacobson, and suggested that I should move to him. At this time the Chemistry Department had moved to the Solna campus and to a completely new building. I started there in the fall of 1951. The Chemistry Department was divided into two sections headed by...
Student Years at the University of Copenhagen
I liked very much my time as a student at the University of Copenhagen. There was a good and relaxed atmosphere. We were very few less than 10 biochemistry students all together at all levels. We had good teachers both at the practical courses and at the lectures, and they were excellent scientists too. One of our teachers in plant physiology Poul Larsen had just found a plant hormone that stimulated the growth of dicotyledones. The compound was isolated and given to our teacher in organic...
Solvation Energy and Phosphate Compounds of High and Low Energy
The concept of energy-rich and energy-poor phosphate compounds was formalized by Lipmann in 1941 46 . On the basis of the knowledge available at that time, Lipmann proposed that the energy that could be derived from the hydrolysis of a phosphate compound would be determined solely by the chemical nature of the bond that links the phosphate residue to the rest of the molecule. In this early work, the possibility that some energy might be derived from the interaction of reac-tant and product with...
Origins
I was born in Saxony, in Halle-an-der-Saale, in 1921, although my father and mother actually lived in the big city of Leipzig, 45 km away. My mother was in fact a Leipzig girl my father, though born in Poland of Jewish parents , had lived in Leipzig for a decade or more and had a thriving business there. Our family moved to England in 1930 and my father lived in England until he died in 1971. Why was I born in Halle It probably reflects nothing more than a shortage of maternity beds in Leipzig...
With Howard Rickenberg in Bloomington Indiana 19631964
In order to reach Bloomington, Indiana, I took a ship that went from Holland to New York. From New York I took the night train to Chicago and from there a train to Bloomington. It was snowing when I arrived. There was no train station. Howard Rickenberg met me at the train. I thought I had ended somewhere in the desert. Howard drove me to the guest house of the university. Visits in the rooms were strictly forbidden. My neighbor was a lady who warned me about the red network, which was active...
Heidelberg
Aristides Pacheco Leao was a distinguished neurophysiologist with an international reputation for the discovery of spreading depression. He was both the president of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and one of the leading scientists of the Biophysics Institute. In August 1969 Aristides quietly suggested that Regina and I should leave the country for one or two years. He had heard unsettling rumors about us and felt we should leave while things cooled down and possible misunderstandings could...
The WennerGren Foundations
In the fall of 1992 I received a phone call from a colleague in Stockholm, who unofficially asked if I would consider to become Science Secretary of the Wenner-Gren Foundations WGS . It was in the middle of my term as president of the academy and I could hardly think of any further duties. I would only accept if the assignment was postponed until 1994. I then got an official invitation to talk to the chairman of the board, Jan Wallander, a former director of one of the major banks in Sweden. We...
Experiments with Penicillin
In a period during the German occupation of Denmark, all lectures were abandoned at the University of Copenhagen. A close friend of mine, Rolf Brodersen, suggested therefore that I in this period performed experimental work together with him at the University Institute of General Pathology where he had a job. At the institute the professor K. A. Jensen, but not the chemist of the same name had managed to isolate a sample of a mould that apparently produced penicillin. He and his assistant...
Conclusion
Half a century ago, biochemistry was regarded as being a bit esoteric and of limited interest for the society. The family of biochemists was so relatively small that almost all in the field knew each other, or at least knew of each other. Looking back over the many years, it is overwhelming to recognize the enormous development of biochemistry in this period. It has been a greatly awarding intellectual experience and a great privilege to have had the opportunity to try to follow this progress....
Historical Perspective
I turn now very briefly to our more serious project of writing a history of proteins the book was completed early in 2001 and published later that year. I should acknowledge at the start our indebtedness to Walter Gratzer's active promotion of the project. Walter recommended it to Oxford University Press he tried valiantly to get us to appeal to the ''popular science'' market -a genre where he himself has been so skilful. He is even the person who proposed the essence of the book's title he...
Protonophores Efim Liberman
Keeping in mind the mechanism of thermoregulatory uncoupling, I started with a program of verification of that part of the chemiosmotic theory that deals with uncouplers. The program in question was initiated by my visit to a workshop on oxida-tive phosphorylation organized by L. Wojtczak just after the Warsaw FEBS Meeting in April, 1966. Here, for the first time, I met Peter Mitchell. I was very much impressed by his personality in spite of the fact that he absolutely failed to Britton Chance...
Experimental Histology 19491951
After my first year at the Karolinska Institute, I was asked by Professor Hjalmar Holmgren to be an unpaid instructor of histology. This was a common way at the time to recruit graduate students. Hjalmar Holmgren held a personal chair of experimental histology. His main contribution had been the identification of heparin in mast cells, but he was also very interested in the regulation of the daily rhythm as mirrored in the biochemical processes in the liver. He was a young energetic man, coming...
In the WatsonGilbert Group 19651968
The three years I spent in the Watson-Gilbert group were the most productive in my life. I had just one goal to isolate Lac repressor. This was dangerous. If I failed, that was it. If somebody else succeeded, and many tried, that was it, too. It was an all or none gamble. The same was true for Wally. He was a physicist. At the time I joined the group he was still teaching theoretical physics at Harvard. In the group were about six to ten graduate students and two postdocs. The principle was...
Neuroblastoma Laminin Binding Proteins
Laminin, the major glycoprotein of basement membrane, is known to promote cell adhesion, growth, migration, and neurite outgrowth. I have, therefore, examined the involvement of laminin in the differentiation of cultured neuroblastoma cells. Together with Nira Garty and Ilana Bushkin-Harav, we have noticed that the differentiation of human neuroblastoma cells is accompanied by increased adhesion to laminin. The major binding site in laminin, mediating cell attachment, was then identified as...
Back in Copenhagen
In those years there was a growing excitement about enzyme reactions involving DNA and other 2-deoxyribose compounds. In 1950 Herman Kalckar together with E. Hoff-Jorgensen and Walter MacNutt, an American research fellow, had found that extracts of Lactobacillus helveticus contained an enzyme that catalyzed the exchange of purines and pyrimidines between 22-deoxyribosides without the intervention of phosphorolysis, i.e. by a trans-N-glycosidase reaction. Kalckar and Morris Friedkin had also...
Research and Graduate Students 19661980
The biological role of connective tissue polysaccharide networks continued to be my own main interest until 1980. However, as should be clear from the previous chapter, there was little time left for me to be at the lab bench even if I was assisted by very efficient technicians. Much of the work was carried out together with guest scientists and many of the concepts had already been formulated. Instead, the new ideas and research lines came from my students and successively from their students....
Von Verschuer Director and Mengele Former Postdoc Now Guest and Collaborator in
In October 1942 von Verschuer became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology in Berlin-Dahlem, and so successor of his teacher Eugen Fischer. Among the scientists who came with him from Frankfurt to Berlin was Dr Ayres de Azevedo, a Portuguese post-doc. Azevedo had come to vanVerschuer' s lab in Frankfurt in July 1941. He stayed with von Verschuer in Berlin until August 1943. He analysed the sera of twins for differences in their blood groups. The bottom line of his research...
Eastman Professor at Oxford
For the year 1977-1978,1 accepted an invitation to be the George Eastman visiting professor at Oxford. This position was established in 1930 through the philanthropy of the American manufacturer, George Eastman. It was limited to American citizens, creating a kind of inverse of Rhodes scholarships. Rhodes scholars have often been viewed in England as visitors from a relatively backward former British colony, coming to Oxford for a taste of culture and scholarship the Eastman professorship...
Subunits and Allosterism
And then quite by chance I even became involved with molecular biology,'' the pinnacle of the bright new look of biological research. After the DNA double helix molecular biology'' had moved to the top of the league in terms of relevance to the ultimate secrets of life. But proteins remained very much a part of the story. How many polypeptide chains How big are they Are they all alike How are they linked These questions were fundamental to an understanding of immunoglobulins, as seen in Figure...
Macromolecules Theoretical Research with JG Kirkwood
I was still of course a physical chemist. My two-year stint at a medical school did nothing to alter my identity. My research interest in proteins was undoubtedly unusual for the typical physical chemist in a chemistry department, whose undergraduate classes held a mixture of aspiring industrial chemists and chemical engineers, but when it came to what the research was about, it was clearly the physical chemistry of proteins -the physical state of protein molecules, the thermodynamics of their...