Edith Bulbring

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Edith Bülbring (born December 27, 1903 in Bonn , † July 5, 1990 in Oxford ) was a German-Dutch pharmacologist .

Life

Her father, Karl Bülbring (1863–1917), was Professor of English from 1893 to 1900 in Groningen , the Netherlands , and then in Bonn. Her mother, Hortense Leonore geb. Kann (1868–1938) came from a Jewish Dutch family. Jacobus H. Kann , his mother's brother, a Dutch banker and Zionist politician, died in 1944 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp . Edith was the youngest of four siblings. She studied medicine in Bonn, Munich, Freiburg and again in Bonn. After the state examination and doctorate to Dr. med. in Bonn in 1928 she joined the Pharmacological Institute of the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin , headed by Paul Trendelenburg . After Trendelenburg's early death from tuberculosis in 1931, she worked, doubting her talent for theoretical-medical research, at the children's clinic in Jena and then with Ulrich Friedemann at the Rudolf Virchow Hospital in Berlin. There, in 1933, immediately after performing an emergency tracheotomy on a child with diphtheria , she was dismissed without notice as a “first degree Jewish half-breed” (with two Jewish grandparents): “Fraulein Bülbring, I see from the questionnaire that you are partially Jewish Origin are. They are no longer needed here. "

She initially planned to continue her clinical work in the Netherlands. During a trip to England with her sister Maud, she met Ulrich Friedemann again in London, who had also been dismissed and went to the later - 1936 - winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Henry Hallett Dale at the Medical Research Council . Dale got her a job with Joshua Harold Burn in the Pharmacology Laboratory of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain . The main task of the laboratory was the standardization of hormone and vitamin preparations in animal experiments . So Bülbring got to know many biological research methods. She also translated Burn's book Methods of Biological Assay into German. In 1937 she followed Burn to Oxford, where he took over the chair of pharmacology. She stayed in Oxford. At first her research was largely driven by Burns interests, but since the end of World War II she has become more independent, and by the early 1950s she found the real topic of her life, the physiology and pharmacology of smooth muscle . In 1967 she was appointed professor. In 1971 she retired, but kept a job at the Oxford Physiological Institute.

Around 40 scientists in Oxford used her to study smooth muscles, including only 7 from Great Britain; 26 were or became professors or department heads. The first were Gustav Victor Rudolf Born (1921–2018), later Professor of Pharmacology at King's College London , Heinz Albrecht Lüllmann (* 1924), later Professor of Pharmacology at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel , and Mollie Elizabeth Holman ( * 1930), later professor of physiology at Monash University , Melbourne , Australia.

She was a member of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford College . She built a house on Oxford's Northmoor Road, where she lived first with Maud and later with her second sister Lucie. The brother, Hans, had died in the First World War. In the late 1970s, a lower leg had to be amputated because of atherosclerosis . She learned to walk and drive again. Later, circulatory disorders also occurred in the other leg. She died a few days after a vascular transplant. She bequeathed her house to her college.

plant

At Trendelenburg, Bülbring developed a method for measuring the pumping capacity of the heart of frogs, thereby refuting the opinion that pentetrazole and nikethamide are suitable for “stimulating” the heart, an opinion that gave the substances the brand names Cardiazol and Coramin .

With Burn, Bülbring investigated problems of the autonomic nervous system , such as the effect of adrenaline on contractions of the skeletal muscles . For this purpose, too, she developed a new experimental set-up consisting of the rat's diaphragmatic nerve and the diaphragm . The publication in the British Journal of Pharmacology 1946: Observations on the isolated phrenic nerve diaphragm preparation of the rat was reprinted fifty years later as a “milestone in pharmacology” with the comment: “The actual results ... in this paper remain difficult to interpret, and are in any case of much less importance than the development of the preparation itself, which was the first mammalian isolated nerve-skeletal muscle preparation to be described. ... The development of other isolated muscle preparations has, of course, followed. ... But Bülbring's isolated phrenic nerve-disphragm of the rat gave impetus to them all, and since 1946 the preparation has been used in a myriad of research experiments, and formed the basis of a multitude of laboratory classes. "

Bülbring's Bonn dissertation dealt with the histology of the adrenal medulla . Twenty years later in Oxford, encouraged by Hermann Blaschko , also an emigrant from Germany, she turned to the biochemistry of this organ and demonstrated that the adrenal medulla hormone adrenaline is formed from noradrenaline .

Bülbring decided to focus on the actual topic of her life around 1950 because she found the properties of smooth muscles puzzling and, secondly, because American scientists had succeeded in making microelectrodes from very thin glass tubes that could be inserted into cells. So there was hope of getting beyond the basics of smooth muscle biology that Emil Bozler (1901–1995) had laid in Great Britain and the USA. In her first publication on this subject, she measured the oxygen consumption of the smooth muscles of the tänie of the appendix of guinea pigs . The first successes with microelectrodes followed. It was not only possible to measure the electrical membrane potential of resting cells, but also, "against all odds", the membrane potential during contraction without the microelectrode slipping out of the cell.

That was the beginning. Bülbring's group then recognized that - important for medicine - the action potentials of most smooth muscle cells are not carried by sodium ions, as in nerve cells, for example, but by calcium ions. One can suppress these action potentials with calcium antagonists . The group explored how neurotransmitters - acetylcholine , norepinephrine, serotonin, and adenosine triphosphate - control smooth muscle. It turned out that calcium not only flows into the smooth muscle cells from the outside, but can also be released from intracellular stores, namely the endoplasmic reticulum . Her last relevant work, an overview of the effects of catecholamines on smooth muscles, was published by Edith Bülbring in 1987 with the Japanese physiologist Tadao Takeda. "Edith's contributions to smooth muscle physiology and pharmacology were immense. ... Her work and that of her collaborators paved the way for the present era of the single cell, and laid the foundations upon which present cellular investigations of smooth muscle are based. "

Honors

Bülbring received honorary doctorates from the universities of Groningen, Leuven and the medical faculty of the Saarland University in Homburg . She was a member of the Royal Society and an honorary member of the British Pharmacological Society, the German Pharmacological Society and the British Physiological Society. In 1974 the German Pharmacological Society awarded her its highest honor, the Schmiedeberg plaque .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c T.B. Bolton and AF Brading: Edith Bülbring. In: Biographical Memoirs of the Royal Society 1992; 38: 67-95. doi : 10.1098 / rsbm.1992.0004
  2. ^ A b A. F. Brading: Smooth muscle research: from Edith Bülbring onwards. In: Trends in pharmacological sciences. Volume 27, number 3, March 2006, pp. 158-165, doi : 10.1016 / j.tips.2006.01.007 , PMID 16473415 .
  3. ↑ JH Burn: Biological evaluation methods. German translation by Dr. Edith Bulbring. Berlin, Julius Springer Verlag 1937
  4. ^ Leopold Ther: Pharmacological methods. Stuttgart, Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft 1949, page 152
  5. ↑ E. Bülbring: The effect of some newer heart drugs on the perfused frog heart. In: Archives for Experimental Pathology and Pharmacology 1930; 152: 257-272
  6. ^ Klaus Starke: A history of Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology . In: Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology 1998; 358: 1–109, here page 46
  7. ↑ E. Bülbring: Observations on the isolated phrenic nerve diaphragm preparation of the rat. In: British Journal of Pharmacology and Chemotherapy 1946; 1: 38-91
  8. ^ WC Bowman: Commentary. In: AT Birmingham and DA Brown (Eds.): Landmarks in Pharmacology. London, MacMillan Press 1997, pp. 1-2. ISBN 0-333-71930-1
  9. ^ Edith Bülbring: The methylation of noradrenaline by minced suprarenal tissue. In: British Journal of Pharmacology and Chemotherapy 1949; 4: 234-247
  10. ↑ Herman Blaschko: A half-century of research on catecholamien biosynthesis. In: Journal of Applied Cardiology 1987; 2: 171-183
  11. ^ Edith Bülbring: Measurements of oxygen consumption in smooth muscle. In: The Journal of Physiology 1953; 122: 111-134
  12. ↑ Edith Bülbring and IN Hooten: Membrane potentials of smooth muscle fibers in the rabbit's sphincter pupillae. In: The Journal of Physiology 1954; 125: 292-301
  13. ^ Edith Bülbring: Correlation between membrane potential, spike discharge and tension in smooth muscle. In: The Journal of Physiology 1955; 128: 200-221
  14. ↑ Edith Bülbing and Tadao Tomita: Catecholamine action on smooth muscle. In: Pharmacological Reviews 1987; 39: 49-96
personal data
SURNAME Bulbring, Edith
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Dutch pharmacologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 27, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Bonn
DATE OF DEATH 5th July 1990
Place of death Oxford