Ernst Boris Chain

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Ernst Boris Chain
Berlin memorial plaque in Berlin-Moabit (Turmstrasse 22, in the former "House of Health", today Berlin public prosecutor's office)

Sir Ernst Boris Chain (born June 19, 1906 in Berlin ; † August 12, 1979 in Castlebar , Ireland ) was a German-British biochemist , bacteriologist and Nobel Prize winner . He is a co-founder of chemical and medical research on antibiotics , especially penicillin .

Life

Ernst Boris Chain, son of the Jewish chemist and chemical manufacturer Michael Chain and Margarete Eisner who immigrated to Germany from Russia, studied chemistry and medicine in Berlin at the Friedrich Wilhelm University from 1924 to 1928 and received his doctorate there in 1930 with Wilhelm Schlenk with the thesis enzymatic Ester formation and ester cleavage to Dr. phil. Chain worked from 1930 to 1933 at the Charité in Berlin, where he continued to work in the chemical department of the local pathological institute with biochemical studies on enzymes .

After the National Socialist seizure of power on January 30, 1933, he emigrated to London, Great Britain , in April 1933 , where he was able to continue his research at the Institute for Biochemistry in Cambridge and received his PhD . He received his teaching license at the Sir William Dunn School of Biochemistry. From 1935 he worked as a chemist and lecturer in chemical pathology at Oxford University in the department of pathologist Howard Walter Florey . Chain received British citizenship in 1939 and the MA Oxon degree in 1945 . In 1949 he became Director of the Research Institute for Chemical Microbiology at the Instituto Superiore de Sanità in Rome and in 1961 Professor (since 1973 Senior Research Fellow and Prof. em.) For Biochemistry and Director at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. In 1961 he also became chairman of the WHO on issues relating to antibiotic research.

Scientific achievement

Chain made a particular contribution to the isolation and chemical description as well as to the systematic improvement of the penicillin first preparation, which he achieved through freeze-drying . Since 1939 he began systematic studies of antibacterial substances from microorganisms with Florey. This brought him into contact with the discoveries about penicillin made by Alexander Fleming ten years ago . However, Fleming made no attempts to use penicillin for medicinal purposes. After weeks of work, Chain and Florey succeeded in stabilizing the unstable penicillin and demonstrating its therapeutic effectiveness against certain bacterial infections in laboratory mice. After this success, Chain continued his research and worked on the isolation and elucidation of the structure of penicillin and other antibiotics. In 1945 he, Alexander Fleming and Howard Walter Florey jointly received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the elucidation of the effects on various infectious diseases and the chemical structure of penicillin .

In addition to his research on penicillin, in which he also discovered penicillinase in 1940 , Chain worked on snake venoms ( glycolysis inhibition ), the metabolism of tumors , the enzyme lysozyme and the relationships between hydrocarbons and amino acids in nerve tissue. He developed methods and devices for biochemical microanalysis.

Honors

In addition, Chain was commander of the Legion of Honor and in 1956 he was the Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic . In 1969 he was raised to the personal nobility as a Knight Bachelor .

Personal

Chain temporarily considered starting a career as a pianist and performed in Berlin in addition to his work in public concerts. Chain, an avid Zionist in later years , married the English biochemist of Russian descent Anne Beloff (1921–1991) in 1948 and had three children with her. Anne Belloff-Chain herself received international recognition for her work on the metabolism of carbohydrates and hormonal aspects of diabetes.

literature

  • John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism . 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , Sp. 143-144.
  • The little encyclopedia. Encyclios-Verlag, Zurich 1950, volume 1, page 281
  • Harenberg Lexicon of Nobel Prize Winners. Dortmund 2000.
  • Lexicon of eminent natural scientists. Volume 1, Heidelberg 2007.
  • Gerlind Büsche-Schmidt: Ernst Boris Chain. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte . De Gruyter, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 236.
  • RO Cassel: Sir EB Chain. In: M. Fox et al. a (Ed.): Nobel Laureates in Medicine or Physiology. New York and London 1990, pp. 84-87.

Web links

Commons : Ernst Boris Chain  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Munksroll: Biography .
personal data
SURNAME Chain, Ernst Boris
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Chain, Ernest Boris
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-British biochemist and bacteriologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 19, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH August 12, 1979
Place of death Castlebar , Ireland