Gunther S. Stent

Gunther S. Stent (born March 28, 1924 as Gunther Siegmund Stensch in Berlin-Treptow ; † June 12, 2008 in Haverford , Pennsylvania ) was an American molecular biologist, neuroscientist and philosopher of science.

From left: Esther Lederberg, Stent, Sydney Brenner, Joshua Lederberg 1965

Life

Stent's father Georg Karfunkelstein Stensch had a prosperous factory for bronze casting and lighting in Berlin. Stent attended the Bismarck Academy and after he was thrown out of it as a Jew and attended the Kaliski Private Forest School ("PriWaKi"). In 1938 his father left Germany, while Stent initially stayed in Berlin with his stepmother. He then fled to Antwerp in November 1938 and then in 1940 via England and Canada to the USA, where he went to school in Chicago, where his sister lived.

He studied physical chemistry from 1942 at the University of Illinois , where he received his bachelor's degree in 1945 and his doctorate in 1948. He then turned to molecular biology (after reading a lecture by Sol Spiegelman and reading Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? ). He went to Max Delbrück at Caltech and attended his famous course in phage research at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory . In 1950 he taught in Copenhagen and in 1951 at the Pasteur Institute in Paris .

From 1952 he was (as an Associate Professor) at the University of California, Berkeley , where he was Professor of Molecular Biology and from 1980 to 1986 headed the Faculty of Molecular Biology and then until 1992 of the converted Department of Molecular Biology and Cell Biology. In 1995 he retired.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1968), the National Academy of Sciences (1982), the American Philosophical Society (1984), the Academy of Sciences and Literature, and the European Academy of Sciences made him a member.

He was married twice (his first wife Inga Loftsdottir Stent died in 1993, he was married to Mary Ulam in his second marriage) and had a son.

plant

Stent was one of the pioneers in molecular biology and phage research in the 1950s. His investigations on phages (1954), in which radioactive phosphorus was built into the genes and whose inactivation he investigated after the radioactive decay of phosphorus, was an early confirmation of the research by James D. Watson and Francis Crick on the double helix nature of genetic material. The early collaboration with Watson and Crick in Europe around 1952 is described in Watson's biographical book The Double Helix , the new edition of which Stent took care of . He wrote an early introductory influential textbook on molecular biology. Later he dealt (after a sabbatical year at Harvard Medical School) with neurobiology, which he studied in sea snails. Among other things, he is known there for an essay from 1973 on the influence of learning on synapses .

He also published on the philosophy of science, which he turned to from the late 1960s (when, in a book from 1969, a little prematurely - as he later admitted - predicted the end of the molecular biologist and science in general based on their own success), and the history of the Biology. His book Paradoxes of Free Will received the 2002 John F. Lewis Award from the American Philosophical Society.

In 1966 he was appointed "External Scientific Member" of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin-Dahlem.

Fonts

Molecular biology of bacterial viruses , Freeman, San Francisco 1963
Molecular Genetics. An introductory narrative , Freeman, San Francisco 1971 (translated into Russian, Italian, Spanish and Japanese, a revision of his book from 1963)
with James D. Watson , John Cairns (Eds.): Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 1966, 1992, 2007
- German: Phages and the development of molecular biology . Ed. And one of the translators Erhard Geissler. Akademie-Verlag , Berlin 1972
with Kenneth J. Muller, John G. Nicholls: Neurobiology of the leech. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory 1981, again 2010 ISBN 1936113090
Nazis, Woman and Molecular Biology. Memoirs of a lucky self-hater , Kensington, California, Briones Books 1998 (autobiography)
with Max Delbrück : Truth and Reality. On the evolution of knowledge , Rasch and Röhring 1986 (English original: Mind from matter? An essay on evolutionary epistemology , Palo Alto 1986)
Paradoxes of progress , Freeman, San Francisco 1978
The coming of the golden age. A view of the end of progress , American Museum of Natural History 1969 (from lectures in Berkeley)
as editor: Morality as a biological phenomenon. Report of the Dahlem Workshop on Biology and Morals, November 1977 , Berkeley, University of California Press 1980
Paradoxes of free will , Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Volume 92, 2002
Ethical Dilemmas in Human Biology , Mannheimer Forum 82/83
Human autonomy. Complexity and Complementarity of Mind , Mannheimer Forum 92/93
with Judith Martin: Bioetikette. About decency and good manners in science , Mannheimer Forum 96/97

literature

David Weisblat, Wes Thompson: Obituary: Gunther Stent , in: Current Biology Vol 18, No 14, pages R585-R587.

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ Sometimes Günter is also given
↑ In his autobiography, he describes how he, as he and his classmates in the Hitler Youth was not until their ban in 1934 in the Jewish youth group The Black troop was
↑ Shortly afterwards he was in Berlin for the US Army to evaluate the state of German science
↑ Stent, Clarence R. Fuerst Inactiviation of Bacteriophages by decay of incorporated radioactive phosphorus , J. Gen. Physiol., Volume 38, 1955, pp. 441-458, PMC 2147492 (free full text)
↑ Stent A physiological mechanism for Hebb's postulate of learning , Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., Vol. 70, 1973, p. 997.
↑ According to John Horgan, he upheld this view in its main features later: Gunther S. Stent, End-of-Science Seer, RIP ( Memento of July 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
↑ Directory of the estate (PDF; 294 kB)

personal data
SURNAME	Stent, Gunther S.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Stent, Gunther Siegmund; Stensch, Gunther Siegmund
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American molecular biologist, philosopher of science, and neuroscientist
DATE OF BIRTH	March 28, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH	Berlin
DATE OF DEATH	June 12, 2008
Place of death	Haverford, Pennsylvania

[1] Sometimes Günter is also given

[2] In his autobiography, he describes how he, as he and his classmates in the Hitler Youth was not until their ban in 1934 in the Jewish youth group The Black troop was

[3] Shortly afterwards he was in Berlin for the US Army to evaluate the state of German science

[4] Stent, Clarence R. Fuerst Inactiviation of Bacteriophages by decay of incorporated radioactive phosphorus , J. Gen. Physiol., Volume 38, 1955, pp. 441-458, PMC 2147492 (free full text)

[5] Stent A physiological mechanism for Hebb's postulate of learning , Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., Vol. 70, 1973, p. 997.

[6] According to John Horgan, he upheld this view in its main features later: Gunther S. Stent, End-of-Science Seer, RIP ( Memento of July 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive )

[7] Directory of the estate (PDF; 294 kB)