Anton Lang (botanist)

Anton Lang (born January 18, 1913 in Saint Petersburg , Russian Empire ; † June 24, 1996 in Oxford , Ohio ) was a Russian-born American botanist who is known for his work on plant hormones.

Life

Lang was the son of the well - known German cardiologist Georgi Fjodorowitsch Lang (1875-1948). He came to Germany with his Russian mother in 1917 via Finland in 1921 and lived in Berlin from 1926. He studied botany from 1931 at the University of Berlin, among others with the plant physiologist Kurt Noack . In 1939 he received his doctorate from the geneticist Elisabeth Schiemann in Berlin with a dissertation on the systematics and evolution of the genus Zieste . He financed himself as an extra in the Berlin State Opera and through lectures on foreign language work for the Botanische Zentralblatt . In 1939 he became an employee of Georg Melchers at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology and worked with him on the physiology of flower formation, photoperiodism in long-day plants and vernalization . After the war he followed Melchers to the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen.

In 1949 he went to McGill University in Montreal on a Lady Davis scholarship, was visiting professor at Texas A&M University and was at Caltech from 1950 , where he researched the effect of auxin on photoperiodicity with Frits Warmolt Went and James Bonner . From 1952 he was at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and after a research stay with Melchers in Tübingen and at the Hebrew University , he took over the management of the Earhart-Campbell Plant Research Laboratory (Phytotron) at Caltech from Frits Warmolt Went in 1959 . There he continued the research program he started at UCLA on the growth hormone gibberellin and researched its synthesis inhibitor. From 1965 he was at the Plant Research Laboratory of Michigan State University in East Lansing, where he was retired in 1983.

1971 to 1974 he was chairman of a commission of the National Academy of Sciences, which should investigate the effect of the massive use of herbicides in Vietnam (defoliation of the jungle, destruction of rice crops). He concluded that slightly more damage had been done than the US military was willing to admit, but that critics' fears were exaggerated and that there was no solid evidence of medical harm to humans. The investigations were hampered by confidentiality regulations and the ongoing warfare in South Vietnam, and there was controversy within the committee about the evaluation. The final report was submitted in 1974, so long-term effects were not taken into account.

In 1975/76 he was a visiting scholar with Mikhail Chailakhyan in Moscow, whose Florigen hypothesis he had confirmed with Melchers in Berlin and Tübingen. From 1977 to 1991 he was the editor of Planta .

He became an honorary member of the German Botanical Society in 1982 and an honorary doctorate in Glasgow in 1981. In 1964 he became a member of the Leopoldina . In 1976 he received the two highest awards of the American Society of Plant Physiologists (Stephen Hales Award, Charles Barnes Life Membership), of which he was president in 1970. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1967) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1968 he was President of the Society for Developmental Biology.

He was stateless for a long time and received US citizenship in 1956.

Fonts

• Physiology of Flower Initiation , in: Lang (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Plant Physiology , Vol. 15-1, Springer 1965, pp. 1380-1536
• Some recollections and reflections, in: Annual Review of Plant Physiology , Volume 31, 1980, pp. 1-28

Web links

• Honorary members of the German Botanical Society, with obituary by Linskens and Melchers
• Hans Kende, Jan Zeevaart, Biographical Memoirs National Academy, pdf

Individual evidence

1. ^ Member entry by Anton Lang at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on October 16, 2015.