Gerrit Toennies

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Gerrit Friedrich Otto Toennies (born January 31, 1898 in Hamburg ; † September 16, 1978 in Malpeque, Kensington , Prince Edward Island , Canada ) was a biochemist .

Life

Gerrit Toennies was the oldest of the five children of the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies and brother of Jan Friedrich Tönnies . He grew up in Eutin (Holstein). After graduating from high school in 1916, he was drafted into the military and soon fell into French captivity (prisoner number 18064). He was employed in a gas works in Le Havre , which justified his interest in chemistry. He then studied this subject in Freiburg im Breisgau , Munich and Kiel , where he received his doctorate in organic chemistry in 1925 as a pupil of the later Nobel Prize winner Otto Diels . Toennies emigrated to the USA in 1926, where he initially worked for the Texas Oil Company in Bayonne (New Jersey) . In 1929 he became a research assistant at the Lankenau Hospital Research Institute (LHRI, now Lankenau Institute for Medical Research LIMR) and later at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia (today: Fox Chase Cancer Center ), of which he headed the microbiology department from 1947 to 1963. On his retirement he was appointed Senior Member Emeritus . From 1963 to 1968 he worked as a research professor at the Temple University School of Medicine and finally as a visiting professor at the University of Göttingen and at the Federal Biological Institute for Agriculture and Forestry in Braunschweig .

Toennies was married to Dita Margarete Jebens (1903–1959) and after her death to Dorothy West (1903–2004). He had two sons, the physicist Jan Peter Toennies (* 1930) and the engineer Ralf Gerrit Toennies (* 1939).

research

Toennies has investigated the biological importance of sulfur compounds in lipid metabolism . He also showed that red blood cells are one of the main sites of action of folic acid compounds , a group of vitamins that play a major role in the accelerated growth of cells, such as occurs in cancer . Toennies has also made a fundamental contribution to understanding the role of various chemicals in bacterial growth. Over the years Toennies has developed various chemical methods, many of which have become standard because of their accuracy and usefulness, such as a method for oxidizing proteins with performic acid , which the English chemist Frederick Sanger used in his research on protein sequencing , for which he in 1958 the Nobel Prize was awarded. Toennies is the author of 114 scientific publications. He has also published a critical essay on the problems of modern society.

Patents

  • Patent US2049480 : Oxidation of Cystine and Related Compounds and process for Making Same. Registered on February 25, 1933 , published August 4, 1936 , inventor: Gerrit Toennies. ‌
  • Patent US2078592 : Oxidation of Cystine and Related Compounds and process for Making Same. Registered December 12, 1934 , published April 27, 1937 , inventors: Gerrit Toennies, Theodore F. Lavine. ‌
  • Patent US2222993 : Process of Recovering Amino Acids. Registered on May 7, 1938 , published on November 26, 1940 , applicant: Lankenau Hospital, inventor: Gerrit Toennies. ‌
  • Patent US2349774 : Acetoxy Amino Acids and Methods for their Preparation. Registered on June 19, 1942 , published on May 23, 1944 , applicant: Lankenau Hospital, inventor: Gerrit Toennies. ‌

literature

  • Uwe Carstens : Dear friend Ferdinand: The remarkable friendship between Theodor Storm and Ferdinand Tönnies. Books on Demand, 2008. ISBN 9783837047622 . P. 99.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Institute for Cancer Research (Philadelphia, Pa.), Fox Chase Cancer Center: Scientific Report , Volume 23 (Nekrolog). P. 267f.
  2. ↑ DN Das, G. Toennies: Relations between coenzyme A and presumptive acyl carrier protein in different conditions of streptococcal growth. In: J Bacteriol. (1969). 98 (3), pp. 898-902. PMID 4977991 .
  3. ^ G. Toennies G, DN Das, F. Feng: Pantothenate and coenzyme A in bacterial growth. In: J Bacteriol. (1966). 92 (3), pp. 707-713. PMID 4958776 .
  4. ^ Toennies, G .: Role of Amino Acids in Postexponential Growth. In: J Bacteriol. (1965), 90, pp. 438-442. PMID 14329458 .
  5. ^ G. Tönnies, DL Gallant: The Relation between Photometric Turbidity and Bacterial Concentration (Bacterimetric Studies IV). In: Growth. 13 (1), 1949, pp. 7-20. PMID 18150958 .
  6. ↑ Microbiological Assay or Bacterimetry. Science 107 (2788): 1948, pp. 598-598. PMID 17754934 .
  7. ↑ Gerrit Toennies, JJ Kolb: Techniques and Reagents for Paper Chromatography . In: Analytical Chemistry . tape 23 , no. 6 , 1951, pp. 823-826 , doi : 10.1021 / ac60054a002 .
  8. ↑ Gerrit Toennies, Richard P. Homiller: The Oxidation of Amino Acids by Hydrogen Peroxide in Formic Acid . In: Journal of the American Chemical Society . tape 64 , no. 12 , 2002, p. 3054-3056 , doi : 10.1021 / ja01264a518 .
  9. ^ G. Tönnies: Where are we and where do we go. Dorrance, Philadelphia 1973, ISBN 0-8059-1913-9 .
personal data
SURNAME Toennies, Gerrit
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tönnies, Gerrit Friedrich Otto; Toennies, Gerrit Friedrich Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German biochemist
DATE OF BIRTH January 31, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH September 16, 1978
Place of death Malpeque , Kensington, Prince Edward Island, Canada