Alfred Gropp

This article was based on formal and / or substantive defects on the quality assurance side of the editorial Medicine entered. Please help fix the shortcomings in this article and join the discussion there . The minimum requirements for medical articles are to be met, thereby avoiding a possible deletion of the article or article passages within four weeks.

Alfred Gropp (born April 15, 1924 in Mannheim ; † October 22, 1983 in Lübeck ) was a German university professor for general and special pathology, whose central research area was primarily the pathology of fetal development and, in connection with it, cytogenetics but also contributed to knowledge of the general biology of inheritance.

Life

Alfred Gropp was born on April 15, 1924 as the son of the wine merchant, who later became mayor of Bad Dürkheim. His mother was of Jewish descent, which is why he experienced racial discrimination as a schoolboy under Nazi rule. Nevertheless, he graduated from school in 1942 with the matriculation examination, but was not allowed to study because of his parentage. He was torn out of training at the tax authorities by being drafted into the Todt Organization and was sent to a labor camp in France. It is said that - although he was “unworthy of military service” and not a soldier - he became a prisoner of war with the Americans, and that he cheated himself into freedom as a farm worker in order to start studying in 1945 as soon as possible. He chose the medical faculty because it was the first to start teaching again in Heidelberg. His wide-ranging interests also led him to lectures in other faculties, especially those of Jaspers, v. Eckardt and Radbruch. ^[1-4]

While still a student, he married his childhood friend and fellow student Dorothea Schuster, who had found protection with the Gropp family after her parents had been arrested and imprisoned in 1943. Her Jewish mother came to Auschwitz and was murdered there in 1944.

On the date of the state examination, Felix, the eldest of the three sons of Dorothea and Alfred Gropp, was born, which meant that Dorothea Gropp was unable to complete her practical training with her compulsory assistantship. Only forty years later did she catch up with them and then, as a widow, she still worked as a doctor. ^[5]

Alfred Gropp got his first assistant position in anatomy, continued his training with Lettré and went to Paris with Oberling, Delarue and Berhard on a WHO scholarship. In 1954 he began his training at the Pathological Institute in Bonn with Herwig Hamperl. After completing his habilitation in 1961, he became a senior physician in 1962, an adjunct professor in 1966 and headed the department for cytology and cytogenetics. During this time, three research stays in 1964/65 led him to Susumu Ohno at the Department of Biology, City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte / California; In 1967 he was visiting professor at the Department of Pathology at Dartmouth Medical School and in 1969 at the University of Chiang Mai in Thailand.

In 1969, under the new professor from Bonn, Peter Gedigk, the Gropps department became the department for pediatric pathology while maintaining its previous research focus. ^{[1- 4]}

In 1972, Alfred Gropp was appointed full professor of general pathology and pathological anatomy at the Medical Academy Lübeck ^[6] at the time, initially at Kiel University as a second medical faculty, but soon became independent as Lübeck Medical School. When Gropp took office, only two more experienced assistants remained there, one of whom had been sent from Bonn. He could still hire assistants among his doctoral students and students, but there was no senior physician, no one with a university teaching license, and not even a specialist in pathology. In addition, the old Lübeck Prosektur was too small for the institute's tasks in teaching, services for the two clinic locations in Lübeck and research. These first years in Lübeck challenged - and overwhelmed - his young assistants, who often had to master tasks that would have been entrusted to specialists or post-doctoral candidates at established institutes. The head of the house himself was the most burdened, however, which is also reflected in the number of Gropps publications, the number of which plummeted in the early 1970s, but then after the establishment of the institute exceeded the productivity of the earlier years. ^[1]

One reason for the underlying personnel misery was that the experienced and proven morphological diagnostician Friedrich Wegener, well networked with the local medical profession, ran a private pathological institute in Lübeck. As a result, the head of the university institute was left with only meager additional income, which made the institute of no interest for specialists and habilitation graduates. In addition, Gropp had a reserve for Wegener, because he was not only the brother of a NSDAP Gauleiter, had worked in Breslau under the racial ideologist Martin Staemmler, had been a NSDAP and SA member from 1932 and had never distanced himself from his Nazi past . When the proposal came up at the university to appoint Wegener an honorary professor because of his services to granulomatosis, which at that time was still under his name, Gropp offered bitter resistance, but could not prevent an honorary doctorate.

At that time, the institute had moved from its confinement in the old prosecution on Kronsford Allee to rooms in the newly built transit area in the clinic on Ratzeburger Allee and two of its employees were recognized as specialists in pathology in 1975 and then advanced to senior physicians as soon as possible to then work on her habilitation. The first was Helga Rehder, who had systematically examined all abortions and carefully documented them for years. She was also tasked with an Italian associate the induced abortions after the Seveso disaster ^[7] to investigate and it also belongs to the US Congress. After the death of her teacher, she switched to human genetics and was later appointed to the chair of this subject in Marburg. In 2003 she received the Jacob Henle Medal from the medical faculty of the Georg-August University in Göttingen .

A former employee of the Bonn institute, Dieter Sellin, who had habilitated in immunology, later joined the team as a senior senior physician, but had to learn the craft of clinical pathological diagnostics from his subordinates, but was able to relieve the institute director of many administrative tasks. Gropp turned down a call to the chair of human genetics at the University of Amsterdam in 1978; the task was tempting for him, but he argued that if you are over fifty you cannot change your profession without a need.

In the last five years of his life, he hosted two major meetings and was the keynote speaker at a third. In 1978 the Cytogenetics Section of the Society for Anthropology and Human Genetics met at his invitation. The 66th conference of the German Society for Pathology in Göttingen in 1982 was tailored to him and his colleagues, and in September 1983 he chaired the 8th International Chromosome Conference in Lübeck as Secretary General. All of this in a comparatively small institute, whose young team, despite all efforts, could not always meet the high expectations of their head of the institute and often required his guidance, advice and direction, especially since his younger senior physician switched to the management of a specialized private institute after his habilitation. So it happened that after the conference in September 1982 Gropp urgently needed a break, which he did not allow himself because, according to a former employee, he wanted to thank the speakers by letter. He is quoted as saying "if it doesn't happen now, it will never happen again." His staff noticed that he was suffering from ailments, but he did not accept any offer of help and in late October he suddenly and unexpectedly passed away after doing weekend gardening had collapsed. ^1,2,3)

At Alfred Gropp's places of work, there were always guest scientists and visitors from all parts of the world, doctors, geneticists, anthropologists and biologists, often illustrious guests, but often also scholarship holders, many of whom remained in contact with him until his death. Pathologists and geneticists, friends, former employees and scholars from Europe, the USA and even Japan traveled to the funeral and memorial service in Lübeck on June 16, 1984.

plant

The time at Lettré with training in tissue culture in vitro laid the foundation for his career in pathology and cytogenetics. The leading pathologist in the German-speaking world at the time, Herwig Hamperl, who had just been appointed to Bonn, accepted him as a student and entrusted him with setting up a tissue culture department in his institute. ^[8,9] Gropp then published mainly on enzyme histochemical investigations as well as phagocytosis and pinocytosis in cell and tissue cultures. He then summarized some of the publications - as is usual with Hamperl ⁸ - into his habilitation thesis (1961).

From 1962 he began to work more and more on chromosome examinations, which then became more and more common after his guest stay at S. Ohno in Duarte (CA). At the time he was doing the cytogenetic examinations for the University Hospital in Bonn. Above all, he and his student H. Rehder examined all possible spontaneous abortions, which Ms. Rehder very subtly dissected and documented and from which, if at all possible, cell cultures were set up and looked for chromosomal abnormalities. With his data he was able to confirm the results of André and Joëlle Boué, that human pregnancies accounted for a rate of spontaneous abortions of over 50% ^12-14 , the majority of them before the first menstrual period ceased. About 5% of these abortions were due to triploidies (three instead of a double set of chromosomes), which could not only be recorded cytogenetically but also DNA-photometrically. ^[10] When the Boués updated and summarized their results after Gropp's death, they honored him by naming him posthumously as a co-author ^15.

This research took on a new dimension through Gropp's studies on cytogenetics and evolution of the chromosome complement of mammals ^29-30 . So he used a vacation for an expedition to catch forest lemmings (Myopus schistocolor) to use their chromosome analyzes to explain the strange sex ratio of these rodents. His finest hour came when E. von Lehmann (Museum König in Bonn) rediscovered the only historically known breed of tobacco mouse (mus musculus poschiavinus) in Val poschiavo in southern Switzerland. In their chromosome set, Gropp found only twenty-six instead of the forty acrocentric chromosomes of the house and laboratory mice, seven of which were metacentric. Since the hybrids with the laboratory mouse were - albeit limited - fertile, the seven metacentric chromosomes had to be homologous to fourteen of the acrocentric chromosomes of the laboratory mouse. Lore Zech, who was the first to describe Q-banding of the chromosomes, was able to confirm this through the banding pattern of the respective chromosomes. ⁴⁹ It was thus a neutral mutation ^{16, 17} , the Robertsonian translocation (or fusion), in which two acrocentric chromosomes merge on the centromere to form a metacentric one ^18.

Already with the first karyograms of the tobacco mouse, Gropp recognized that he could develop a unique system from the hybrids of tobacco and laboratory mice for the investigation of chromosome maldistribution and especially of trisomies by breeding mice with a single metacentric chromosome. In their hybrids with the laboratory mouse, more defined trisomies had to occur. These, in turn, were a model for the trisomies caused by chromosome translocation in humans, such as in individual cases of Down syndrome. First, the malformations of embryonic trisomies were analyzed ^19-21,23 but ^{this was} soon followed by studies of the gene-dose ratio in trisomies ²² and the effects of trisomies on individual organ systems, especially blood formation ^24-28 , so that E. Capanna, who lives in the Apennines had discovered two further wild mouse strains ("CB" and "CD") with Robertsonachian translocations, wrote that Gropp had presented the cytogeneticists with the examination possibilities "on a silver platter". ²⁷

Works

• Alfred Gropp: Experiments on the laxative and anthelmintic effects of lentin in small animals . Leipzig 1934, DNB  570665426 (veterinary medical dissertation).
• Alfred Gropp: The mitosis of the Triton palmatus germ and its influence by colchicine . In: Zeitschr. f. microscope.-anatom. Research tape 56 , issue 4. Heidelberg November 30, 1950, DNB  570665426 , p. 479-519 (Med. F., Diss.).
• Alfred Gropp: Uptake of in vitro cultured cells, with special consideration of phagocytosis and pinocytosis . Westdeutscher Verlag, Cologne / Opladen 1968, DNB  456812474 .

Individual evidence

1. Sellin D .: Obituary for the memorial for Alfred Gropp on June 16, 1984, Institute for Pathology of the (then) Medical University of Lübeck; Lübeck 1984, private print
2. Sellin, D.: Memorial sheet Alfred Gropp Verh. Dtsch. Ges. Path. 68: 597-608 (1984)
3. Rehder, Helga, H. Winking, JMOpitz, JF Reynolds: Obituary Alfred Gropp, Am. J. Med. Gen. , 21: 211-212 (1985);
4. S. Ohno: Obituary Alfred Gropp, Chromosomes Today 8, i - vii (1984)
5. Bernard, Sibylle: Dear Dorothea (obituary) Schleswig-Holstein Ärzteblatt 12/2008
6. Johannisson, R .: On the history of the Institute for Pathology at the University of Lübeck Focus Uni Lübeck 26, 34-37 (2009)
7. Rehder, Helga, Sanchioni, F., Cefis, F., Gropp, A .: Pathological-embryological studies on abortion cases in connection with the Seveso accident. Switzerland. Med. Wochenschr. 108: 1617-1625 (1978)
8. Hamperl, H .: Career and life path of a pathologist, FK Schatthauer, Stuttgart - New York 1972, p 249
9. same as p. 256
10. Kunze, W.-P: Cytophotometric DNA measurement in abortion. Path. Res. Pract. 162, 253-262 (1978)
11. Gropp, A .: Chromosome examinations in cases of spontaneous abortion. Rat. Dtsch. Ges. Pathol. 51: 278-281 (1967)
12. Gropp, A .: Fetal mortality due to aneuploidy and irregular meiotic segregation in the mouse. In: Chromosomal errors in relation to reproductive failure. Compte rendue du colloque organise sous la patronage de INSERM / A. Boue et Ch. Thibault (eds.). Paris 1973, September 12-14, 1973, pp. 255-269.
13. Boué, A. et al. Joëlle Boué: Chromosomal anomalies in early spontaneus abortion; Curr. Top. Path. 62, 193-208, (1976):
14. Boue, A., Boue, J. and Gropp, A .: Cytogenetics of pregnancy wastage. Adv. Hum. Genet. 14: 1-57 (1985)
15. Boue, A., Boue, Joëlle et al. Gropp, A .: Cytogenetics of Pregnancy Wastage. Adv. Hum. Genet. 14: 1-57 (1985)
16. Zech, Lore, Evans, EP, Ford, CEu Gropp, A .: Banding patterns in mitotic chromosomes of tobacco mouse. Exp. Cell Res. 70: 263-268 (1971)
17. Gropp, A., Tettenborn, U. u. von Lehmann, E. Chromosome variation of the Robertsonian type in the tobacco mouse, M. poschiavinus, and its hybrids with the laboratory mouse. Cytogenetics 9: 9-23 (1970)
18. Ohno, S .: Evolution by Gene Duplication, Springer-Verlag, New York 1970
19. Gropp, A., Putz, B. u. Zimmermann, U.: Autosomal monosomy and trisomy causing developmental failures. In: Developmental Biology and Pathology / A. Gropp and K. Benirschke (eds.). Curr. Top. Pathol. 62: 177-192 (1976)
20. Gropp, A., Winking, H., Putz, Barbara: Critical points in development. of trisomic mouse embryos. European Society of Human Genetics, Southampton, July 19-21, 1979. Clin. Genet. 17:70 (1980)
21. Putz, Barbara, Gropp, A.: Pathology of chromosomal abnormalities: experimental model on the mouse. Rat. Dtsch. Ges. Pathol. 66: 378 (1982)
22. Epstein, CJ, Tucker, G., Travis, B., Gropp, A .: Gene dosage for isocitrate dehydrogenase in mouse embryos trisomic for chromosome 1. Nature (Lond.) 267: 615-616 (1977)
23. Gropp A, Winking H, Herbst EW, Claussen CP .: Murine trisomy: developmental profiles of the embryo, and isolation of trisomic cellular systems. Journal of Experimental Zoology.; 228: 253-269 (1983).
24. Gropp, A., Winking, H., Herbst, EW, Claussen, C.-P .: Murine Trisomy: Developmental Profiles of the Embryo, and Isolation of Trisomic Cellular Systems. J. Exp. Zool. 228: 253-269 (1983)
25. Herbst, EW, Gropp, A., Tietgen, C.: Chromosome Rearrangements involved in the origin of Trisomy 15 in Spontaneous Leukemia of AKR Mice. Int. J. Cancer 28: 805-810 (1981)
26. Herbst, EW, Gropp, A., Sellin, D., Hoppe, H: The hematopoietic system of mouse trisomy 16 - model of hematological and immunological disorders in DOWN syndrome. Rat. Dtsch. Ges. Pathol. 67: 654 (1983)
27. Capanna, E., Winking, H., Redi, CA, Gropp, A. Structural genome rearrangement in the mouse: Rb metacentrics in feral populations in Italy. Workshop on Molecular Genetics of the Mouse II, Sandbjerg Slot, August 11-16, 1980. Hereditas 94: 8 (1981 )
28. Fredga, K., Gropp, A., Winking, H., Frank, F. Fertile XX- and XY-type females in the wood lemming Myopus schisticolor. Nature (Lond.) 261: 225-227 (1976)
29. Fredga, K., Gropp, A., Winking, H., Frank, F. A hypothesis explaining the exceptional sex ratio in the wood lemming (Myopus schisticolor) .: Hereditas 85: 101-104 (1977)
30. Gropp, A., Citoler, P., Geisler, M .: Karyotype variation and heterochromatin pattern in hedgehogs (Erinaceus and Hemiechinus), Chromosoma (Berl.) 27: 268-307 (1969)
31. Geisler, M., Gropp, A .: Chromosome polymorphism in the European Hedgehog, Erinaceus europaeus (Insectivora). Nature (Lond.) 214: 396-397 (1967)