Eduard Buchner

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Eduard Buchner, 1907
1914 in northern France (center, row 1)
Obituary by Carl Harries , 1917

Eduard Alois Buchner (born May 20, 1860 in Munich ; † August 13, 1917 in Focşani , Romania ) was a German chemist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1907 for his investigations and the discovery of cell-free fermentation (1896). He is considered the founder of enzymology .

Life

Buchner was born in Munich as the third child of the royal court staff physician and professor of forensic medicine Ernst Buchner († January 2, 1872) and his third wife Frederike Buchner. His brother Hans Buchner was also a doctor; active as a private lecturer at the medical faculty of the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich .

After attending primary school, Buchner went to the Maximilians-Gymnasium in Munich in 1871. As a result of the untimely death of his father, he had to leave high school early to start training with his father's brother. Thanks to the initiative of his mother's eldest brother, Uncle Hans Martin, Buchner was able to resume schooling. After attending a commercial school, he returned to a secondary school in Munich, where he graduated from high school in 1877. Then he went to the 3rd field artillery regiment "Prince Leopold" as a one-year volunteer. After completing his military training in 1878, a phase of self-discovery began for him. He enrolled at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich from 1877 to 1883 , but completed inorganic internships with Emil Erlenmeyer at the Technical University of Munich from 1878 to 1881 . In 1879 he participated scientifically in Walter Nägeli's canning factory in Munich and Mombach , but suffered economic losses. After all, this initiated his pioneering research into biochemical fermentation processes . In 1883 he was called up again for military service.

From 1882 to the end of 1884, Eduard Buchner studied fissure fungi and the influence of oxygen in fermentation processes with interruptions in time . At that time he was working under the guidance of his brother Hans at the botanical institute of Carl Wilhelm von Nägeli .

In the winter semester of 1883/84 he continued his studies at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. He studied organic chemistry as a major with Adolf von Baeyer and botany with Carl Wilhelm von Nägeli and physics as a minor . Von Baeyer and his assistant Theodor Curtius recognized Buchner's outstanding abilities. In the course of the course there was strong intellectual competition with v. Baeyer, but an intense friendship with Curtius. He was born in November 1888 at v. Baeyer is doing his doctorate on a new synthesis of derivatives of trimethylene , but had to work on the last parts of his dissertation with Curtius at the University of Erlangen . Curtius had left the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich in the winter semester of 1885/86, since v. Baeyer refused him a post- doctoral thesis that had been promised in early 1882 .

Buchner's first scientific publication in 1885 dealt with the role of oxygen in fermentation processes; Among other things, he described Pasteur's methodical errors. In 1888 he finished his studies with a doctorate and completed his habilitation in 1891 with v. Baeyer with a thesis " On syntheses of pyrazole, pyrazoline and trimethylene derivatives using diazoacetic ether - A contribution to the knowledge of the circular atomic bond "; his first trial lecture was on " The chemical processes during fermentation ". He was now five years older than colleagues with a comparable academic career.

In autumn 1893 he followed his friend Curtius to the University of Kiel , where he taught as a private lecturer. During this time they jointly founded the Kiel section of the German Alpine Club with 20 members.

In 1896 he was appointed associate professor for analytical and pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of Tübingen . This is where the first work on cell-free alcoholic fermentation was written. This work earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1907 . Von Baeyer had received the Nobel Prize two years earlier.

In 1898 he was appointed full professor of chemistry at the Agricultural University in Berlin . Here he also took over functions at the Institute for Fermentation Industry and published another paper on cell-free fermentation. As he described it in 1903, Buchner had obtained the ferment (he called it zymase) of alcoholic fermentation (he called it zymase) by squeezing yeast cells that had previously been ground with sand (Pasteur had still demanded that living yeast cells be a prerequisite for the sugar test tube) Fermentation). Buchner's investigations showed that there was no difference between ferment and enzyme. On August 19, 1900, he married Lotte, the daughter of Professor Hermann Stahl from Tübingen . The couple established a middle-class family life in Berlin with three children (Friedel * 1901, Hans * 1905 and Rudolf * 1908). Buchner converted to the Protestant denomination in Berlin. In 1904 he was elected to the board of the German Chemical Society in Berlin for one year . Also in 1904, the Prussian minister of education, Friedrich Althoff, prevented his appointment as the successor to Ludwig Claisen as professor of chemistry at the University of Kiel .

In 1909 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina . He followed a call as full professor of chemistry at the University of Breslau , but found little pleasure in the working conditions and missed city life in Silesia. Therefore, he applied with renewed enthusiasm in Bavaria to succeed Julius Tafel in Würzburg.

At the end of 1910, for the summer semester of 1911, he was offered the chair of the Institute of Chemistry at the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg . When the First World War broke out , he was drafted as captain and promoted to major in a transport unit in September 1915. Since the university in Würzburg became increasingly orphaned, the faculty in Würzburg complained to the War Ministry at Christmas 1915 that it would be released on the grounds that " so that the chemical institute would be in order again ". He was discharged from military service in March 1916. After the USA entered the war, Buchner reported again in April 1917 as a nationally conscious volunteer and commanded a Bavarian ammunition column. On August 11, 1917 he was seriously wounded near Focşani ( Romania ). He died of the injury two days later in the field hospital. He was buried in the Focşani military cemetery.

Honors

Predecessor at chem. Institutes in Würzburg

City map Würzburg approx. 1900
  • Joseph von Scherer (1842–1869 †; Juliusspital, from 1867 new chemical institute in Maxstrasse 4)
  • Adolph Strecker (1869–1871 †; Chem. Institute in Maxstr. 4)
  • Johannes Wislicenus (1872–1885; Chem. Institute in Maxstrasse 4)
  • Emil Fischer (1885–1892; Chem. Institute in Maxstrasse 4)
  • Arthur Hantzsch (1893–1903; Chem. Institute at Maxstr. 4, from 1896 new Chem. Inst. At Pleicher Ring 11)
  • Julius Tafel (1903–1910; Chem. Institute at Röntgenring 11 ( street name renamed in 1909 ))

Publications

  • Eduard Buchner: Alcoholic fermentation without yeast cells (preliminary communication) . In: Reports of the German Chemical Society . tape 30 , 1897, pp. 117-124 ( online ).
  • Eduard Buchner, Rudolf Rapp: Alcoholic fermentation without yeast cells . In: Reports of the German Chemical Society . tape 32 , 1899, pp. 2086 ( online ).

literature

  • Friedrich KlemmBuchner, Eduard. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 705 ( digitized version ).
  • Robert Kohler : The background to Eduard Buchner's discovery of cell-free fermentation . In: Journal of the History of Biology . tape 4 , no. 1 , 1971, p. 35-61 , doi : 10.1007 / BF00356976 .
  • Robert Kohler: The reception of Eduard Buchner's discovery of cell-free fermentation . In: Journal of the History of Biology . tape 5 , no. 2 , 1972, p. 327-353 , doi : 10.1007 / BF00346663 .
  • Lothar Jaenicke: Hundred years of Nobel Prize to Eduard Buchner, the founder of biochemistry in the test tube, and thus of experimental molecular biosciences. In: Angewandte Chemie. 2007, 119, pp. 6900-6905. (Series: Essay)
  • Peter Lietz : Eduard Buchner on the 150th birthday. In: Yearbook of the Society for the History and Bibliography of Brewing e. V. Hg .: Society for the History of Brewing : Berlin 2010; Pp. 72-86

Web links

Commons : Eduard Buchner  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Biography Eduard Buchner (PDF; 36.4 MB).
  2. Rolf Ukrow: Nobel Prize Winner Eduard Buchner (1860–1917) A life for the chemistry of fermentation and - almost forgotten - for organic chemistry. Dissertation . Berlin 2004. (PDF; 8.5 MB).
  3. E. Buchner: About the influence of oxygen on fermentation. In: Hoppe-Seyler's Journal for Physiological Chemistry . 9 (1885), pp. 380-415.
  4. biographical data, publications and Academic pedigree of Eduard Buchner at academictree.org, accessed on 22 January 2018th
  5. see: About the influence of oxygen on fermentation. In: Hoppe-Seylers Zeitschrift für Physiologische Chemie 9 (1885), pp. 380-415
  6. ^ DAV-Kiel founded on December 8th, 1893 with its own Kieler Wetterhütte in Verwall (in the Paznauntal (Austria)) .
  7. E. Buchner: Alcoholic fermentation without yeast cells (preliminary communication). In: Reports of the German Chemical Society 30 (1897) 117–124. doi : 10.1002 / cber.18970300121
  8. E. Buchner, R. Rapp: Alcoholic fermentation without yeast cells . In: Reports of the German Chemical Society 32 (1899) 2086-2094. doi : 10.1002 / cber.189903202123
  9. ^ Otto Westphal , Theodor Wieland , Heinrich Huebschmann: life regulator. Of hormones, vitamins, ferments and other active ingredients. Societäts-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1941 (= Frankfurter Bücher. Research and Life. Volume 1), p. 63 f.
  10. ^ Obituary by C. Harries to Eduard Buchner, page 1850.
  11. Helmut Gruber (Ed.): Ridge walks. Memoirs of Wolfgang Gruber (1886–1971). Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2018, pp. 74f.
  12. ↑ Successor to the chair in Würzburg: Otto Dimroth (1918–1937).
  13. 100 years of experimental and training institute for breweries in Berlin (VLB). Editor Hans Günter Schulze-Berndt, VLB: Berlin 1983, ISBN 3-921690-25-0 , p. 339