Edgar Lederer

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Edgar Lederer (born June 5, 1908 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; died October 19, 1988 ) was a French biochemist from Austria, known for his research into numerous natural products and his role in the development of chromatography .

Life

Lederer studied chemistry in Vienna, where he received his doctorate in 1930. He then went to the University of Heidelberg , where he was in Richard Kuhn's laboratory and where he met his future French wife, Hélène Fréchet, and then, since he had no future prospects in Germany, from 1933 in Paris , for a time in Leningrad and then back in Paris. In 1938 he became a French citizen. During the German occupation in World War II, he was in Lyon at the laboratory of Claude Fromageot (1899-1958). After the war he returned to Paris in 1947, where he was first Maitre de Recherche and then Directeur de Recherche of the CNRS .

In 1958 he became professor of biochemistry at the Sorbonne , where he established and headed a new institute for biochemistry in Orsay in 1963 , where he stayed until his retirement in 1978. At the same time, he has been head of the Institut de Chimie des Substances Naturelles (ICSN) in Gif-sur-Yvette near Paris since 1960 .

In 1931 he improved adsorption chromatography at Richard Kuhn and thus enabled preparative isolation of individual components by column chromatography .

The chromatography itself had been developed before by the Russian botanist Michael Tswett (1906, presented in a book in 1910), Leory Sheldon Palmer (whose book Lederer studied from 1922), Charles Dhéré and others, but received little attention until 1931. After the decisive improvement by Kuhn and Lederer in 1931, chromatography became an essential tool, especially in biochemistry. They improved the original paper chromatography method so that it could also be applied to hydrophilic and colorless substances. Lederer applied chromatography to the isolation of numerous natural substances such as B. on carotenoids such as astracene from lobster shells, vitamin A 2 , lipids and peptides from microbes, pheromones from bees. He also dealt with the analysis of perfumes. Another research focus was microbiology. He identified proteins in bacterial walls that are important for immune defense and studied the pathogen causing tuberculosis .

In 1951 he received the Ernest Guenther Award , in 1974 the gold medal of the CNRS and in 1982 he was elected to the Académie des Sciences . In 1964 he gave the Paul Karrer Lecture . In 1982 he received the Robert Koch Medal . He was also a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 1976 he received the MS Tswett Chromatography Medal with V. Pretorius, AT James, G. Guiochon, MJE Golay. Since 1961 he was a member of the Leopoldina .

Lederer and his wife Hélène Fréchet had seven children.

Fonts

  • Edgar Lederer Itinéraire d'un biochimiste français , éditions Publibook, 2007

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ R. Kuhn, A. Winterstein and E. Lederer, On the knowledge of the xanthophylls in Hoppe-Seyler's journal for Physiolog. Chemie 197 , 141 (1931), p. 147. They separated carotene into its constituents α-, β- and γ-carotene and xanthophylls . - R. Kuhn and E. Lederer: Breakdown of carotene into its components. (About the vitamin of growth, I. Mitteil.) In: Reports of the German chemical society 64 , 1349-1357 (1931), doi : 10.1002 / cber.19310640624 .
  2. ^ Charles W. Gehrke, Robert Wixom, Ernst Bayer (editor) Chromatography: a century of discovery 1900-2000 , Elsevier 2001
personal data
SURNAME Lederer, Edgar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French biochemist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH June 5, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH October 19, 1988