Fritz Schaudinn

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Fritz Schaudinn

Fritz Richard Schaudinn (also: Friedrich Schaudinn ; born September 19, 1871 in Röseningken (then East Prussia ), † June 22, 1906 in Hamburg ) was a German zoologist and protozoa researcher . Together with Erich Hoffmann, he discovered the syphilis pathogen Spirochaeta pallida (also known as Treponema pallidum ) in 1905 at the Charité Clinic in Berlin .

Life

Schaudinn attended high schools in Insterburg and Gumbinnen . His intention to study philology at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin , he gave up after a year and in 1890 turned to the natural sciences, especially zoology . During his studies dealt Schaudinn to excitation Franz Schulze Eilhard especially with the study of protozoa . His dissertation deals with the reproduction of the foraminifera . In March 1894 he was promoted to Dr. rer. nat. PhD and was appointed assistant at the Zoological Institute of Berlin University in October.

After completing his habilitation in 1898, Schaudinn and Fritz Römer undertook a scientific expedition to the Northern Arctic Ocean with the fish steamer Helgoland, which was chartered for this purpose . The Helgoland expedition was initially planned as a hunting trip by its leader, Theodor Lerner , but the participation of the two zoologists gave it a scientific character. It was possible to circumnavigate the island of Svalbard almost completely and to reach König-Karl-Land . The rich zoological yield of the expedition gave rise to the publication of Fauna Arctica , a comprehensive representation of the entire arctic animal world . A cape on the island of Abeløya is now named after Fritz Schaudinn.

In 1901 he was appointed head of the Malaria Research Station in Rovigno ( Istria ) by the Imperial Health Department . During this time, research into tropical diseases was promoted in the German Reich in order to support efforts to establish a colonial empire of its own . During this time he confirmed the work of Sir Ronald Ross and Giovanni Battista Grassi in malaria research. The connection between insect bites and malaria was already known and Schaudinn seemed to be the first to demonstrate the exact process of malaria infestation of blood cells under the microscope. Although his observations were incorrect, they were accepted thanks to Schaudinn's great international reputation for almost 30 years and could only be corrected in 1931 by Sydney Price James (1870-1946). Under Schaudinn's direction, a malaria control campaign was also tested for the first time in a larger epidemic area through targeted treatment of the residents.

In 1904 he returned to Berlin to head the Institute for Protist Studies at the Imperial Health Department. In 1905, the now highly respected scientist was commissioned to review the findings of the zoologist John Siegel, who, like Schaudinn, was a pupil of Schulze, who reported having identified a flagellated protozoa as the causative agent of syphilis , which he named Cytorhyctes luis . He had already described similar pathogens for smallpox , foot-and-mouth disease and scarlet fever . In collaboration with the Berlin dermatologist Erich Hoffmann, Schaudinn discovered the real pathogen on March 3, 1905 after a few days of intensive work on the microscope. Medical circles in Germany initially did not believe his results, among other things because numerous medical professionals did not accept the zoologist Schaudinn. However, the findings quickly caught on abroad and have been confirmed several times.

In addition, Schaudinn established that Entamoeba histolytica is the causative agent of amoebic dysentery , and also researched the non-harmful intestinal flora .

Shortly before his untimely death, he gave up his position in the Imperial Health Department and in April 1906 switched to the Hamburg Institute for Ship and Tropical Diseases .

The journal Archiv für Protistenkunde , founded by Schaudinn in 1902, is still published today, now under the title Protist by Elsevier-Verlag . On the occasion of its centenary, the Fritz Schaudinn Prize, endowed with 2,000 US dollars, was donated in 2002 for the best original work published in Protist in 2002 and 2003 and awarded once to two teams from Japan and Germany. Since 1955, the German Dermatological Society has awarded the Schaudinn-Hoffmann plaque to outstanding doctors and scientists who have made a special contribution to researching, treating and combating infectious diseases of the skin and the adjacent mucous membranes, especially venereal diseases.

Schaudinn was awarded the Tiedemann Prize of the Senckenberg Natural Research Society in 1903 . In 1905 he was decorated with the Officer's Cross for the Franz Joseph Order . He was a corresponding member or honorary member of several scientific societies.

tomb

His grave on Luisenfriedhof II in Berlin-Westend was dedicated to the city of Berlin from 1962 to 2012 as an honorary grave .

There is an estate in the Tübingen University Library (shelf number: Mn 54).

Fonts (selection)

  • Investigations on foraminifera. I. Calcituba polymorpha. Roboz , Dissertation University of Berlin 1894.

literature

  • Peter G. Hesse / Joachim S. Hohmann: Friedrich Schaudinn (1871-1906). His life and work as a microbiologist; a biography , Lang, Frankfurt / M. 1995, ISBN 3-631-48140-3 .

sources

Web links

Commons : Fritz Schaudinn  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Fritz Schaudinn: The reproduction of the foraminifera and a new kind of nuclear nutrition. Diss. Berlin 1894.
  2. Fritz Schaudinn: About the importance of protozoa research for cell theory. Habil. 1898.
  3. Kapp Schaudinn . In: The Place Names of Svalbard (first edition 1942). Norsk Polarinstitutt , Oslo 2001, ISBN 82-90307-82-9 (English, Norwegian).
  4. Gabriele Franken: Walter Kikuth and Lilly Mudrow - New ideas in malaria research . In: Axel Karenberg, Dominik Groß, Mathias Schmidt (eds.): Research on the history of medicine: Contributions from the "Rheinischer Kreis der Medizinhistoriker" . kassel university press, Kassel 2013, ISBN 978-3-86219-416-2 , p. 173–184 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  5. PK Kohl and I. Winzer: 100 years of discovery of the Spirochaeta pallida . In: Dermatologist 56, 2005, pp. 112–115.
  6. Wolfgang Regal, Michael Nanut: Cupid's poisoned arrow ( Memento from March 6, 2016 in the Internet Archive ). In: Doctors Week 23/2005.
  7. Bernd Rolle: Editorial . In: Protist , accessed March 11, 2016.
  8. ^ Website of the German Dermatological Society , accessed on September 9, 2012
  9. Federal Archives, Central Database of Legacies . Retrieved September 11, 2019.