Edward Calvin Kendall

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Edward Calvin Kendall

Edward Calvin Kendall (born March 8, 1886 in South Norwalk , Connecticut ; died May 4, 1972 in Princeton , New Jersey ) was an American biochemist . Kendall succeeded in isolating the thyroid hormone thyroxine and determining the structure of glutathione . In the 1940s he also isolated the adrenal hormone cortisone and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1950 together with Tadeus Reichstein and Philip Showalter Hench .

Life

Edward Calvin Kendall was born in South Norwalk , Connecticut , in 1886, the third child of George S. and Eva F. Kendall. His father was a dentist and was active in local politics, the parents and upbringing were Christian. Kendall went to Franklin Elementary School and then to South Norwalk High School for two years and Stamford High School for a year, where he prepared for college.

He studied at Columbia University in New York City as one of the first students under Henry Clapp Sherman , where he received his Bachelor of Science in 1908 and his Master of Science in chemistry in 1909 . After completing his master's degree, he became the first Goldschmidt Fellow at the university until 1910, before he received his doctorate in chemistry for his work on the enzyme amylase . After receiving his doctorate, he went to Parke, Davis and Co. , now a subsidiary of Pfizer , in Detroit , Michigan , as a researcher for five months as a researcher on September 1, 1910 , and worked on thyroid biochemistry . He carried on this work from 1911 to 1914 at St. Luke's Hospital in New York City , where he was initially allowed to set up the medical laboratory without a salary. In 1915 he married Rebecca Kennedy (1892–1973), with whom Kendall had four children: Hugh, Roy, Norman and Elizabeth.

William and Charles Horace Mayo, the founders of the Mayo Clinic that Kendall worked for. William and Charles Horace Mayo, the founders of the Mayo Clinic that Kendall worked for.
William and Charles Horace Mayo , the founders of the Mayo Clinic that Kendall worked for.

On the recommendation of Clarence M. Jackson , in 1914 Kendall became an employee of William and Charles Horace Mayo at the Mayo Clinic , who had a special interest in thyroid disease. Here he later became head of the biochemistry department of the Graduate School of the Mayo Foundation in Rochester , which was associated with the University of Minnesota . In 1915 he became director of the Biochemistry Department at the University of Minnesota and professor of physiological chemistry. Until the late 1920s, Kendall was researching thyroxine and its effects, but was wrong when it came to determining the structure. After that he worked on various amino acids , especially glutathione . In the early 1930s he began researching the adrenal gland and the hormones produced in this organ. He isolated u. a. the cortisone , the therapeutic effect in the treatment of rheumatism he could enlighten together with Philip S. Hench disease control. In 1950 he and the Swiss Tadeus Reichstein, who was also able to isolate cortisone at about the same time and independently of Kendall, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine .

Kendall stayed at the university and was retired on April 1, 1951 , as well as visiting professor of the Biochemistry Department at Princeton University . Also in 1951 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society , a year earlier he had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences . In 1971, Kendall published his autobiography Cortisone: Memoirs of a Hormone Hunter . He died on May 4, 1972 in Princeton, New Jersey.

plant

Early work

Kendall published the first research work together with his professor Henry Clapp Sherman in the Journal of the American Chemical Society , which dealt with the identification of reducing sugars with the help of p -bromobenzohydrazide . For his doctoral thesis entitled A Quantitative Study of the Action of Pancreatic Amylases , he worked on pancreatic amylase , an enzyme produced in the pancreas that is necessary for the digestion of carbohydrates . In particular, he was able to demonstrate the dependence of the amylase activity in the breakdown of sugars on the sodium chloride concentration. At that time, Sherman was working very intensively on plant and animal enzymes and involved his undergraduate and graduate students in this research. For his series Studies on amylases alone , he published a total of ten papers with various students from 1910 to 1915.

Thyroid hormones

Chemical structure of thyroxine

After completing his doctorate, Kendall worked as a researcher at Parke, Davis and Co. on the thyroid gland and its function, and specifically on isolating the previously little-known thyroid hormone. In doing so, he built on the work of the German chemist Eugen Baumann , who was able to examine and isolate organically bound thyroid iodine until his death in 1896 . This was used to treat hypothyroidism , the congenital or acquired low thyroid function. By 1913, Kendall was able to obtain about 100 times the amount of the active substance compared to Baumann and prove its effect on dogs as well as on patients with hypothyroidism. During his later employment at the Mayo Clinic, Kendall was again tasked with isolating the hormone from surgically removed thyroid tissue. With the help of ethanol as a solvent, he managed to achieve iodine concentrations of 47% by the end of 1914 after the hydrolysis of the tissue. When Kendall fell asleep during an experiment on December 23, 1914 and all of the ethanol in the sample evaporated, he was able to notice a white, ethanol-insoluble incrustation that contained 60% iodine. He made large quantities of the substance over Christmas and dissolved it in ethanol with a little sodium hydroxide and after adding a few drops of acetic acid he was able to observe crystal formation. The analyzes showed that the crystals were a pure amino acid .

Kendall assumed that it was an oxindole , which he called 'thyroxine'; changed to 'Thyroxine' in English. After he was able to isolate enough pure crystals in the following years, he used them in clinical experiments and was able to show that this thyroxine had the full effect of the thyroid hormone in the treatment of hypothyroidism. In the following years, Kendall concentrated on the chemical and physiological properties as well as on the isolation of larger amounts of thyroxine and was able to obtain about 33 grams of the thyroid hormone from about three tons of pig thyroid tissue. Thanks to the preliminary work of Kendall, the chemist Charles Robert Harington was able to produce a synthetic thyroxine in 1927 by condensing two molecules of diiodotyrosine , which had the same properties as thyroxine and thus led to the correct dissolution of the chemical structure of thyroxine.

Glutathione: Kendall was the tripeptide glutathione isolate and identity as a tripeptide of the amino acids glutamic acid , cysteine and glycine notice

Kendall's research later focused on the effects and oxidation processes in the human body that are triggered by thyroxine. Here he focused his work on cysteine and glutathione . The latter was not available at the time and the Mayo Clinic was commissioned to crystallize it and make it available for synthesis. Glutathione was first isolated and named by Frederick Gowland Hopkins in 1921. Kendall worked with Bernhard F. McKenzie and Harold L. Mason on the task and was also able to isolate it as well as crystallize it and determine its identity as a tripeptide from the amino acids glutamic acid , cysteine ​​and glycine .

Cortisone

Chemical structure of cortisone

In the early 1930s, Kendall began to study the hormonal function of the adrenal gland . At that time it was known that the adrenal hormones had central and vital functions, since patients and test animals died after the organs were removed. However, there was still no knowledge of the exact physiological relationships. Kendall isolated 28 substances, six of which showed physiological effects and were named substances A, B, C, D, E and F by him. He then concentrated primarily on substance E, which he called cortisone , and was able to prove that test animals without an adrenal gland survived after injection of the substance. The same substance was discovered around the same time by Tadeus Reichstein in Zurich and by a working group led by Oskar Wintersteiner .

Together with his colleagues, Kendall was able to optimize the isolation from bile acid and thus produce 400 grams of the cortisone by April 1948. He sent this to a total of 28 clinics for clinical and therapeutic testing, but received no confirmation that cortisone had a potential healing effect. In September 1948, the doctor and professor Philip Showalter Hench, also active at the Mayo Clinic, injected the cortisone he had received from Kendall into a woman suffering from rheumatic joint inflammation , and did so again in the following days. After only one week, the patient was free of pain and was able to make her first attempts at walking; the success was also evident in other patients. Cortisone thus opened up new therapeutic options for rheumatism research and treatment, even if it has no effect beyond the duration of intake and could only be used to a limited extent due to strong side effects.

In 1951 Robert B. Woodward found a way for the total synthesis of cortisone for the first time, which no longer had to be isolated from tissue and could accordingly be produced and used in larger quantities. By 1953, cortisone was already available in large quantities in the United States and became one of the most important medicines. By the end of the 1960s, however, it was replaced by cortisol or hydrocortisone, which is the actually effective form of cortisone. Preparations introduced later, such as prednisolone derivatives, which, in addition to being more effective, also have fewer side effects, continued to displace cortisone. However, cortisone is still used, especially in the case of a hormone deficiency and allergic reactions.

Awards

In 1949, Kendall received the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research . A year later, together with Tadeus Reichstein and Philip S. Hench , he received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in equal shares for their discoveries in the hormones of the adrenal cortex, their structure and their biological effects . In 1952 he received the George M. Kober Medal .

literature

Web links

Commons : Edward Calvin Kendall  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g Dwight Ingle: Edward C. Kendall 1886–1972 in the Biographical Memoir series of the National Academy of Sciences , 1975.
  2. ^ A b Charles Glenn King: Henry Clapp Sherman 1875–1955 in the Biographical Memoir series of the National Academy of Sciences , 1975.
  3. ↑ a b c d Edward C. Kendall - Biographical by Edward Calvin Kendall on the pages of the Nobel Foundation for the award ceremony in 1950 (English). Retrieved from nobelprize.org on February 2, 2015; published in: Nobel Lectures, Physiology or Medicine 1942–1962. Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam 1964.
  4. ^ Wouter W. de Herder: Heroes in endocrinology: Nobel Prizes. In: Endocrine Connections. 3 (3), 2014, pp. R94-R104. doi: 10.1530 / EC-14-0070
  5. ^ Member History: Edward C. Kendall. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 21, 2018 .
  6. ^ Edward Calvin Kendall, Henry Clapp Sherman: The detection and identification of certain reducing sugars by condensation with para-bromobenzylhydrazide. In: Journal of the American Chemical Society. 30 (9), 1908, pp. 1451-1455. doi: 10.1021 / ja01951a019
  7. ^ Edward Calvin Kendall: A Quantitative Study of the Action of Pancreatic Amylases. Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford C., New York 1910.
  8. ^ Edward Calvin Kendall, Henry Clapp Sherman, ED Clark: Studies on Amylases. I. An Examination of Methods of Diastatic Power. In: Journal of the American Chemical Society. 32 (9), 1910, pp. 1073-1086. doi: 10.1021 / ja01927a010
  9. ^ Edward Calvin Kendall, Henry Clapp Sherman, ED Clark: Studies on Amylases. II. A study of the action of pancreatic amylase. In: Journal of the American Chemical Society. 32 (9), 1910, pp. 1087-1105. doi: 10.1021 / ja01927a011
  10. ^ Edward Calvin Kendall: The isolation in crystalline form of the compound containing iodine which occurs in the thyroid: Its chemical structure and physiological activity. In: Transactions of the Association of American Physicians. 30, 1915, pp. 420-429.
  11. ↑ a b c Asfandyar Khan Niazi, Sanjay Kalra, Awais Irfan, Aliya Islam: Thyroidology over the ages. In: Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism. 15 (Supplement 2), 2011; Pp. S121-S126. doi: 10.4103 / 2230-8210.83347
  12. ^ Edward Calvin Kendall: Isolation of the Iodine Compound Which Occurs in the Thyroid. In: The Journal of Biological Chemistry. 39, 1919, p. 125. (full text)
  13. ^ Edward Calvin Kendall: The Development of Cortisone As a Therapeutic Agent. Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1950 (full text)
  14. ↑ a b c Kendall, Edward Calvin In: Bernhard Kupfer: Lexicon of Nobel Prize Winners. Patmos-Verlag, Düsseldorf 2001, ISBN 3-491-72451-1 , pp. 237-238.
  15. ↑ a b c d e Peter Dilg : Cortisone. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner: Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. Volume 1, De Gruyter, Berlin et al. 2004, 2011, ISBN 978-3-11-097694-6 , p. 275 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  16. ^ Renate Wagner: Kendall, Edward Calvin. In: Werner E. Gerabek, Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil, Wolfgang Wegner: Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. Volume 2, De Gruyter, Berlin et al. 2004, 2011, ISBN 978-3-11-097694-6 , pp. 731-732 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  17. ↑ Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1950 award ceremony for Edward Calvin Kendall (English)
personal data
SURNAME Kendall, Edward Calvin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American biochemist
DATE OF BIRTH March 8, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH South Norwalk , Connecticut , USA
DATE OF DEATH May 4th 1972
Place of death Princeton , New Jersey , USA