Hanni Erxleben

Johanne Wilhelmine "Hanni" Erxleben (born June 22, 1903 in Bremen , † 2001 in Bielefeld ) was a German biochemist . She was involved in research on plant hormones by Fritz Kögl and was involved in a research scandal.

Life

Erxleben was the daughter of a musician and attended the grammar school at the Kleine Helle (today the location of the old grammar school ) in Bremen and then the upper lyceum of A. Kipfenberg to become a teacher. From 1924 she was a teacher. In 1926 she began to study chemistry in Göttingen . At times she also studied at the Technical University of Munich . In 1930 she received her doctorate from Fritz Kögl in Göttingen with a dissertation on the ingredients of mushrooms. She then followed Kögl to Utrecht , where she was assistant and from 1936 senior assistant (after Arie Jan Haagen-Smit went to the USA ). In 1938 she became a Dutch citizen and in 1939 a private lecturer. During the German occupation she sympathized with this and the National Socialist movement in the Netherlands (in contrast to her teacher Kögl, who supported the resistance and was therefore able to continue his career in Utrecht after the war) and left when the impending defeat loomed in September 1944 back to Germany. At first she was in East Germany, but came to Bremen in 1946. Until 1952 she was a teacher at the secondary school at the Kleine Helle. Kögl again offered her an assistant position in Utrecht in 1952, but she went to the Bavink Gymnasium in Bielefeld (now Gymnasium am Waldhof ) as principal . In 1962 she became a high school councilor in Münster . In 1966 she retired and lived in Bielefeld.

In 1975 she was one of the founders of the Federation for Animal and Nature Conservation in Bielefeld.

Biochemical work and allegations of counterfeiting

In his laboratory in Utrecht, Kögl, with the participation of his assistant Erxleben, isolated a substance from human urine which they called auxin and which they considered to be a long-sought plant growth hormone (publications from 1931, still without Erxleben). In 1934 the group (Kögl, Haagen-Smit, Erxleben) also published a find in plant material, but now in a different form (auxin-B, the auxin from human urine was renamed auxin-A). The further interpretation of the events is controversial. According to a description given, for example, in the book by Zankl, Erxleben subsequently falsified the laboratory results and claimed to have found a structural formula for auxin A and B. She acted out of fear of Kögl, as she could not reproduce his published results (according to another version, she adored him and did not want to disappoint him). However, other groups like Thimann's could not reproduce the finds and finally Kögl had to admit that the results could be flawed, and in 1953 it was finally clarified by paper chromatography that the findings of auxin had no basis and that the actual growth factor also had no basis the heteroauxin found by the von Kögl group.

In addition to auxin, they also discovered a substance that they called heteroauxin (chemically structured differently than the auxin they had previously found, as it also contained nitrogen). It was later identified as indole-3-acetic acid , so that they found this substance from the group of auxins independently of Kenneth V. Thimann .

The research on auxins was sensational at the time and promoted the career and reputation of both Kögl and his assistant Arie Jan Haagen-Smit , who made a career in the USA based on the results and became a professor at Caltech .

The forgeries were repeated with a result in Kögl's laboratory, which was also sensational at the time, which probably also went back to manipulations by Erxleben (Zankl). They found the D-form of amino acids (especially glutamic acid) in tumor tissue, instead of the L-form, which is exclusively found in living beings, and saw this as an important clue to the cause of cancer development. Hans Fischer was also unable to reproduce the results in his laboratory, but after a visit from Erxleben in 1944 he succeeded, which Fischer later attributed to a deception by Kögl's assistant.

While allegations of forgeries against Erxleben were raised early on (as stated by Feodor Lynen in the obituary for Kögl 1959), other authors did not find the attribution of guilt so clear and charged Kögl with considerable complicity. He used to run his laboratory in an authoritarian manner, was not involved in the actual laboratory work in Utrecht, but on the other hand was very interested in publishing as many results as possible under his name. In his laboratory there were also published results, some of which were grossly incorrect, at least nine times, with Erxleben only being significantly involved in two (and marginally in two others). In no case was the allegation of forgery raised. While Kögl enjoyed a high degree of external respect during his lifetime, Erxleben was unpopular with her Dutch colleagues because of her sympathy for National Socialism and her authoritarian demeanor towards subordinates. Even Samuel G. Wildman (1912-2004, professor at UCLA and even active in auxin research in the 1940s) found it hard to understand how a single employee should be guilty of a research on auxin, resulting in 14 publications of the Kögl group between 1933 and 1944 in the Zeitschrift für Physiologische Chemie von Hoppe-Seyler (in which Kögl was co-editor).

Fonts (selection)

• with Hildegard Wolf: Plea for the hedgehog, Bielefeld 1981
• with Kögl, Haagen-Smit: About a new Auxin ("Hetero-Auxin") from Harn, Journal of Physiological Chemistry, Volume 228, 1934, pp. 90-103

literature

• James R. Troyer: Error or Fraud Science: Auxins A and B and animal tumor proteins, Journal of the North Carolina Academy of Science, Volume 124, 2008, pp. 1-5, pdf
• Heinrich Zankl: Forgers, swindlers, charlatans: Fraud in research and science, Wiley-VCH 2003
• Schnepff: Forgeries - not only in our time, Biology in our time, Volume 32, 2002, p. 164
• SG Wildman: The auxin-A, B enigma: scientific fraud or scientific ineptitude?, Plant Growth Reg., Vol. 22, 1997, pp. 37-68.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ P. Wieland, RS de Ropp, RS Avener, Nature, Volume 173, 1953, p. 776. Shortly before his death in 1959, Kögl passed samples to his colleague JFG Vliegenthart, who examined them with mass spectrometry and X-ray crystallography, also with negative results and published in Recueil de Pays-Bas, vol. 85, 1966, pp. 1266-1272
2. ↑ She had obtained large quantities of D-glutamic acid from the Elberfeld paintworks, more than were necessary for comparison purposes in the laboratory
3. ↑ Troyer, J. North Carolina Acad., 2008, p. 3
4. ↑ As well as Peter Karlson in a review of plant hormone research 1982, Ectohormones and Phytohormones, TIBS, 7, 1982, pp. 382-383
5. ↑ Troyer, J. North Carolina Acad., 2008, p. 4