Gottfried Fraenkel

Gottfried Samuel Fraenkel (born April 23, 1901 in Munich , † October 26, 1984 in Urbana , Illinois ) was a German-American zoologist ( entomologist ).

Life and activity

Fraenkel was a son of the lawyer Emil Fraenkel (1867–1942) and his wife Flora, born. Because. He had an older sister, Anny Roth (* 1900) and a younger sister, Lisbeth (1903-1939). The parents and the older sister emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s . Fraenkel's uncle was the merchant Siegmund Fraenkel . His cousin was the mathematician Adolf Abraham Halevi Fraenkel .

Fraenkel attended the Wilhelmgymnasium in Munich, where he passed his Abitur in 1920. He then studied natural sciences (chemistry) with a major in zoology at the University of Munich . In between he spent a semester at the Technical University in Wroclaw . His main interest at the time was the behavior and orientation of animals. 1925 doctorate Fraenkel with one of Otto Koehler supervised work on jellyfish (jellyfish) for Dr. phil. (Examination date March 4, 1925). He had spent a few weeks at the zoological research station in Naples to collect material for this work . This trip became necessary after his own collections of leeches and fish were destroyed in a laboratory accident. In his work he demonstrated that the statocysts of medusae serve these animals as gravity receptors - an idea that was diametrically opposed to the then prevailing doctrine.

After completing his doctorate, Fraenkel returned to the research station in Naples on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation . He then worked for a while as a teacher at the Israelite Realschule in Leipzig. In 1927 he received a scholarship from the Notgemeinschaft der deutschen Wissenschaft , with which he was able to conduct research with Alfred Kuhn at the University of Göttingen . Activities at the zoological stations in Roscoff and Plymouth followed .

In 1928 Fraenkel, who had been involved in the Zionist movement that had emerged in Germany in the early 1920s, went to Palestine to work as a teacher there in the 1920s. Under the influence of Friedrich Simon Bodenheimer , the head of the zoological department of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem , who offered him an assistant position, he turned away from teaching at school and towards university research. He took the outbreak of a locust plague soon afterwards as an opportunity to research the physiology and behavior of migratory locusts , on which he presented several papers. In the course of his investigation of the behavior of grasshoppers, he discovered the tarsal reflex (the removal of the substrate from the tarsus leads to certain insects that they adopt a posture that is customary in flight and begin to flap their wings), which formed a basis for further laboratory studies on insect flight . He stayed in Jerusalem until 1930.

After his return to Germany, Fraenkel, after completing his habilitation , taught zoology as a private lecturer at the University of Frankfurt from 1931 to 1933 .

After the seizure of power by the Nazis in the spring of 1933, Fraenkel was due to its - by Nazi definition - displaced Jewish ancestry from the civil service. In the same year he moved to London, where he worked as a researcher at the University College of the University of London . During this time he carried out highly acclaimed experiments on the ligation of fly larvae. Through this, he was able to demonstrate the presence of moulting hormones in flies, with which he carried out a basic work on modern insect endocrinology . In 1935 he was a lecturer ( lecturer ) at the Imperial College of Science and Technology bestallt at the same institution: he was thirteen years for this facility until 1948, active. In 1939, due to the outbreak of World War II , he was evacuated to Slough along with the rest of the Zoological-Entomological .

After his emigration, Fraenkel was classified as an enemy of the state by the National Socialist police forces: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin placed her on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or important, which is why they should be successful if they were successful Invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht should be located and arrested by the occupying troops following SS special commandos with special priority.

In 1946 Fraenkel went on a lecture tour to the University of Minnesota . In this way he was noticed by colleagues from the University of Illinois , so that in 1947 he was appointed professor of entomology at this institution. After he accepted this, he moved to the United States in 1948, where he taught from 1948 until his retirement in 1972 as a professor of entomology at the University of Illinois. In 1953 he was naturalized in the United States .

Fraenkel's main areas of research were comparative sensory and nerve physiology . During his time at the University of Illinois, Fraenkel succeeded in 1952, together with the biochemist Herbert Carter, in isolating and identifying vitamin B _T (compare Tenebrio spec. ) As carnitine . As a result, it was possible to demonstrate the general occurrence of carnitine in cofactor A transfer reactions (Coenzyme A transfer reactions).

In 1968 Fraenkel taught as a visiting professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at the University of Paris .

Fraenkel's estate is now in the archives of the University of Illinois.

Honors

Fraenkel was an honorary doctor of the Université Francois Rabelais Tours (1982) and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1984). Since 1968 he was a member of the American National Academy of Sciences . He was also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1972) and an honorary member of the Royal Entomological Society (1955) and the Linnean Society of London (1982)

family

In 1928 Fränkel married Rachel Sobol (* 1902 in Malat, Lithuania; † 1984). The sons Gideon August Fraenkel (* February 21, 1932 in Frankfurt) and Dan (* 1937 in London) emerged from the marriage. The former later became professor of chemistry at Ohio State University, the latter professor of microbiology at Harvard University.

Fonts

• The static sense of the Medusa , Munich 1925. (Dissertation)
• The Orientation of Animals , 1940.
• Bibliography on Insect Nutrition , 1947.
• The Orientation of Animals: Kineses, Taxes and Compass Reactions , 1961. (with Donald Livingston Gunn)

literature

• American Jews: Their Lives and Achievements: A Contemporary Biographical Record , 1958, Vol. 2, p. 225.
• International Who's Who, 1983-84 , p. 436.
• Govindan Bhaskaran / Stanley Friedman / JG Rodriguez: Current Topics in Insect Endocrinology and Nutrition. A Tribute to Gottfried S. Fraenkel , 1981.
• Holger Kiehnel / Barbara Seib: Die Juden der Frankfurter Universität , 1997, p. 97f.
• C. Ladd Prosser / Stanley Friedman / Judith H. Willis: "Gottfried Samuel Fraenkel. 1901-1984. A Biographical Memoir", in: National Academy of Sciences: Yearbook, Washington DC 1990, pp. 169-195. ( Digitized version )
• Obituary in the Chicago Tribune on October 27, 1984.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Andreas Schatz / Christian Wiese: Janus figures: "Jüdische Heimstätte", Exile and Nation in German Zionism , 2006, p. 101.
2. ↑ [1]
3. ↑ Govindan Bhaskaran: Current Topics in Insect Endocrinology and Nutrition: A Tribute to Gottfried S. Fraenkel. Springer Science & Business Media, Berlin / New York 2012, ISBN 1-4613-3210-9 , p. 3
4. ↑ George Wolf, The Discovery of a Vitamin Role for Carnitine: the First 50 Years, Journal of Nutrition, Volume 136, 2006, pp. 2131-2134, online
5. ↑ [2] .