Birgit Vennesland

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Birgit Vennesland (* 17th November 1913 in Kristiansand , Norway ; † 15. October 2001 in Kāne'ohe , Hawaii ) was a Norwegian biochemist who in the United States grew, and 28 years at the University of Chicago , and for several years in Germany at the Vennesland research center named after her worked in the Max Planck Society . She mainly dealt with photosynthesis and enzymes such as dehydrogenases and oxidoreductases .

Life

Birgit Vennesland and her twin sister Kirsten were born on November 17, 1913 in Kristiansand on the southern tip of Norway. Both parents were teachers, but her father made several trips to Canada and the United States , where he eventually studied in Chicago and established himself as a dentist . In 1917 his wife followed with their two five-year-old daughters. Here attended these public schools and from 1930 the University of Chicago , where they graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1934 . Birgit Vennesland received her doctorate in biochemistry in 1938, and her sister became a doctor.

Birgit Vennesland then stayed for a year as a research assistant at the University of Chicago and in 1939 received a scholarship to go to Paris to Otto Fritz Meyerhof . With the outbreak of the Second World War , the plans came to nothing and she attended Harvard Medical School until 1941 and studied with Albert Baird Hastings . Here she was involved in the first experiments with the short-lived radioactive carbon - isotope 11 C to study the synthesis of glycogen , the in vivo on laboratory rats were conducted. She then returned to Chicago, where she taught chemistry and in 1944 became an assistant professor at the university. During the Second World War she also worked for the Office of Scientific Research and Development .

After the war she rose to professor (1957) and worked for a total of 28 years at the University of Chicago until 1968. The focus of research was the formation of carbohydrates during photosynthesis , with special attention to the coenzyme NADP , as well as the dehydrogenases , whereby she showed in collaboration with Frank Westheimer by means of deuterium labeling that hydrogen is transferred directly to the coenzyme in NAD + -dependent redox reactions and the reaction catalyzed by alcohol dehydrogenase is stereospecific .

Through her work on photosynthesis, especially on the Hill reaction , Otto Warburg , the then director of the Max Planck Institute for Cell Physiology in Berlin-Dahlem , became aware of Birgit Vennesland and brought her to Berlin in 1968 as his successor. She headed the institute until 1970 and then moved to the newly created research center named after her, which was created by the Max Planck Society also because of tensions between Warburg and Vennesland. Until 1981 she devoted herself to nitrate reductases , their enzymatic and metabolic characterization and D- amino acid oxidase . After her retirement, her laboratory building was used by the Otto Warburg Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics.

After her retirement, Birgit Vennesland moved to live with her sister in Hawaii, where she worked for several years from 1987 onwards at the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa . She died on October 15, 2001 in Kāneʻohe.

Awards

literature

  • Eric E. Conn, Elfriede K. Pistorius, Larry P. Solomonson: Remembering Birgit Vennesland (1913-2001), a great biochemist. In: Photosynthesis Research. Vol. 83, No. 1, 2005, pp. 11-16.
  • Lothar Jaenicke: Birgit Vennesland. In: BIOspectrum. Vol. 8, No. 1, 2002, pp. 53-54.
  • Elizabeth H. Oakes: Encyclopedia of World Scientists. Revised Edition, Facts On File, 2007, ISBN 978-1-4381-1882-6 , p. 737 f. ( online ).
  • Birgit Vennesland: Recollections and Small Confessions. In: Annual Review of Plant Physiology. Vol. 32, 1981, pp. 1-21, doi : 10.1146 / annurev.pp.32.060181.000245 .
  • Eckart Henning , Marion Kazemi: Handbook on the history of the institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm / Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science 1911–2011 - data and sources. Berlin 2016, 2 volumes, volume 2: Institutes and research centers MZ. ( online, PDF 75 MB ) pp. 1589–1590 (chronology of the research center).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Elizabeth H. Oakes: Encyclopedia of World Scientists. Revised Edition, Facts On File, 2007, p. 737 f.
  2. ^ Birgit Vennesland: Recollections and Small Confessions. In: Annual Review of Plant Physiology. Vol. 32, 1981, pp. 1–21, here p. 2.
  3. ^ Birgit Vennesland: Recollections and Small Confessions. In: Annual Review of Plant Physiology. Vol. 32, 1981, pp. 1-21, here pp. 7 f.
  4. ↑ a b Lothar Jaenicke: Birgit Vennesland. In: BIOspectrum. Vol. 8, No. 1, 2002, pp. 53-54.
  5. ^ Birgit Vennesland: Recollections and Small Confessions. In: Annual Review of Plant Physiology. Vol. 32, 1981, pp. 1-21, here pp. 10-14.
  6. ^ Awards and Funding - Past Awardees. American Society of Plant Biologists. Retrieved August 11, 2014.
personal data
SURNAME Vennesland, Birgit
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Norwegian-American biochemist
DATE OF BIRTH November 17, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Kristiansand , Norway
DATE OF DEATH October 15, 2001
Place of death Kāneʻohe , Hawaii