Berta Scharrer

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Berta Scharrer (born December 1, 1906 as Berta Vogel in Munich , † July 23, 1995 in New York ) was involved in the development of the new scientific discipline neuroendocrinology . According to her in was Australasia occurring cockroach Escala Scharrerae their research in recognition invertebrates named.

Life

Berta Vogel was born as the daughter of Johanna Weiss Vogel and the Vice President of the Bavarian Supreme Court, BayObLG Karl Phillip Vogel. She did her doctorate in 1930 at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich with a thesis on the nutritional quality of various sugars for honey bees. At the university she worked with Prof. Karl von Frisch . Already at this time she drew the conclusion from her laboratory tests on minnows that nerve cells can also secrete certain substances, similar to the hormones in endocrine gland cells . This contradicted the doctrine of the time that nerve functions were an exclusively electrical phenomenon.

In 1934 she married Ernst Scharrer (1905–1965), with whom she had previously worked for two years at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry in Munich. Afterwards she worked without pay at the Edinger Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt am Main . Together they continued their research on neuroendocrine functions, Berta Scharrer on invertebrates and her husband on vertebrates. In 1935 Berta Scharrer described neurosecretory cells in the snail species Aplysia and the worm Nereis . However, her work was largely rejected by the rest of the scientific community.

Forced by the onset of Nazi terror, the beginning of the Holocaust , she emigrated with her husband to the USA in 1937 . To do this, they used a Rockefeller Research Fellowship awarded to Ernst Scharrer by the University of Chicago. Despite her financially difficult situation, Berta Scharrer continued her research in a laboratory in Chicago. Above all, she used the South American giant cockroach Leucophaea maderae as an experimental animal , as it did in the following four decades of her scientific work. In 1938 she was able to detect neurosecretory cells in arthropods . Two years later she presented her findings to American science for the first time in New York. From 1940 to 1946 she taught at the histological institute of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, then at the University of Colorado Denver , both of which, however, again in unpaid positions.

In September 1955 she received a professorship at Albert Einstein College of Medicine , a college of Yeshiva University in the Bronx, despite discrimination against female scientists . Her husband died in a swimming accident in 1965 .

In 1976 she took over the faculty management of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and stayed there until her retirement, for the first time with reasonable pay. The concept of neuroendocrinology and neuro-secretion that Berta Scharrer and her husband had developed was recognized as an independent scientific discipline. Berta Scharrer received increasing recognition and awards for her achievements, such as B. Harvard University for "as well as a nomination for a Nobel Prize for her pioneering research in brain chemicals." In the late 1970s she published a comprehensive theory on the evolutionary origin of neurosecretory cells and studied the properties of neuropeptides . In the following decade, she conducted research in the new field of comparative neuroimmunology .

Berta Scharrer died in New York only 5 months after she retired.

Awards (selection)

Publications

  • Neuropeptides and immunoregulation (1994) New York City, ISBN 0-387-57188-4
  • Functional morphology of neuroendocrine systems: evolutionary and environmental aspects (1995) New York City, ISBN 0-387-18155-5
  • Manual of the microscopic anatomy of humans, Vol. 6: Blood and lymphatic vessels: Inner secretory glands , T. 5: The adrenal gland. Neurosecretion (1954)
  • The structure of the ring-gland (Corpus allatum) in normal and lethal larvae of Drosophila melanogaster (1938) Washington, DC

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Book of Members ( PDF ). Retrieved April 10, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Scharrer, Berta
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vogel, Berta (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German endocrinologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 1, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH July 23, 1995
Place of death new York