Friedrich Vogel (human geneticist)

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Friedrich Otto Vogel (born March 6, 1925 in Berlin , † August 5, 2006 in Heidelberg ) was a German human geneticist . He coined the term pharmacogenetics in 1959 . He also played a key role in ensuring that German human genetics regained international renown after the Second World War. His research areas were mutation research , population genetics , behavioral research and genetic family counseling .

Life

After military service and brief imprisonment, he began to study medicine at the Berlin Humboldt University in 1946 , which he continued from 1948 at the newly founded Free University . From 1952 he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Hereditary Biology and Hereditary Pathology . He was a student of Hans Nachtsheim . In 1962 he became director of the newly founded Institute for Anthropology and Human Genetics at Heidelberg University , which he headed until his retirement in 1993. Even after that, Vogel was still active as a consultant and book author.

Services

During his time in Berlin, Vogel researched, among other things, the genetic basis of retinoblastoma , a hereditary cancer of the eyes. His textbook on general human genetics , published in 1961, was the first standard human genetic work in the German language. Later he dealt with mutation research, population and behavioral genetics . An important area of ​​research was the genetic basis of the electroencephalogram . Since the second half of the 1960s, he has been instrumental in setting up a network of human genetic counseling centers in Germany; together with Walter Fuhrmann he wrote the book Genetic Family Counseling. In 1979 the first edition of the 800-page work Human Genetics - Problems and Approaches appeared, which he wrote together with Arno Motulsky . This book saw two new editions during his lifetime (1986 and 1996). With Arno G. Motulsky he created a complete revision of his textbook on human genetics in 1979, which, edited by other authors, appeared in its 4th edition in 2010 under the title Vogel and Motulsky's Human Genetics - Problems and Approaches and is still considered a standard work on human genetics. With Motulsky he was also the editor of the journal Human Genetics at Springer Verlag, which replaced the journal for human inheritance and constitution theory there in 1964 and has been called Human Genetics since 1976 .

In addition to his scientific achievements, Vogel was instrumental in helping human genetics to regain a new reputation in Germany after the Second World War. In the time of National Socialism , various human rights violations were committed with pseudo-scientific “genetic” justification (see National Socialist Racial Hygiene ). Vogel orientated himself mainly on the Anglo-Saxon human genetics - in 1958 a research stay took him to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (USA) - and strove for ideology-free science. He also made contacts in India , Japan and the Soviet Union . A high point of his career was 1986, when the International Congress of Human Genetics took place in Berlin under his leadership . It was the first time since the Second World War that this global human genetics meeting was held in Germany, and thus a sign that German human genetics had regained its international reputation.

Honors

For his scientific work Vogel in 1965 was awarded the Michael Award of the Foundation Michael and the 1966 Hans-Berger Prize of the German Society for Clinical Neurophysiology and Functional Imaging , 1988 an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Berlin, 1994, Jacob Henle medal and 2003 together awarded the GfH Medal of Honor by the German Society for Human Genetics with Arno Motulsky . In addition, Vogel was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit. In 1973 he became a member of the Leopoldina selected. Since 1989 he has been a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences .

Fonts

  • General human genetics textbook . Berlin / Göttingen / Heidelberg 1961.
  • Genetic family counseling . Berlin / Heidelberg / New York 1968.
  • with P. Propping : Is our fate born? Berlin 1981.
  • with Arno Motulsky : Human Genetics - Problems and Approaches. Berlin / Heidelberg / New York 1979, ISBN 3-540-09459-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ F. Vogel: Modern problems of human genetics. In: resulting Inn Med Kinderheilk. 12, 1959, pp. 52-125.
  2. ↑ Götze, Springer-Verlag, Volume 2, 1994, p. 309. According to this, Nachtsheim was still considered politically harmless by the Springer Verlag in the 1990s during the Nazi era.
  3. ↑ In the preface to the bird book human genetics in the world today (1989) it is of Gerhard Czihak as a student of Hans Nachtsheim referred
  4. ↑ O. Steinlein, C. Fischer, R. Keil, R. Smigrodzki, F. Vogel: D20S19, linked to low voltage EEG, benign neonatal convulsions, and Fanconi anaemia, maps to a region of enhanced recombination and is localized between CpG islands . In: Hum Mol Genet. 1, 1992, pp. 325-329.
  5. ↑ A. Anokhin, O. Steinlein, C. Fischer, Y. Mao, P. Vogt, E. Schalt, F. Vogel: A genetic study of the human low-voltage electroencephalogram. In: Hum Genet. 90, 1992, pp. 99-112.
  6. ^ F. Vogel: Genetics and the Electroencephalogram. Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg / New York 2000.
  7. ↑ Götze, Springer Verlag, Volume 2, 1994, p. 309
  8. ↑ member entry by Friedrich Vogel at the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , accessed on 12 June 2016th
  9. ↑ Friedrich Vogel in the membership directory of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences
personal data
SURNAME Vogel, Friedrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vogel, Friedrich Otto (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German human geneticist
DATE OF BIRTH March 6, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH August 5, 2006
Place of death Heidelberg