Henrik Lundegårdh

Henrik Gunnar Lundegårdh (born October 23, 1888 in Stockholm , † November 19, 1969 in Penningby ) was a Swedish botanist . From 1912 to 1969 he conducted research in the fields of ecology and plant physiology .

Early years

Henrik Lundegårdh was born into a wealthy Stockholm family. He was a talented student who also played the violin and was interested in art . In 1907 he graduated from Stockholm University and received his doctorate in 1912. His early microscopic studies of plants and cells were influenced by the Swedish botany professor Gustaf Otto Rosenberg . In 1910 he turned his interest to plant physiology and especially the influence of salt on plant roots. He spent two semesters in Germany, in the laboratories of Georg Albrecht Klebs in Heidelberg and Wilhelm Pfeffer in Leipzig . Many of his later scientific publications appeared in the original in German, but were often translated into other languages.

Researches

From 1915 to 1926 Lundegårdh worked at Lund University . On the island of Hallands Väderö , he had a station for experiments built, largely from his own resources, where he wanted to research the measurability of the exchange between plants and the environment. He showed great talent in developing novel instruments for research. The work there resulted in several publications; the best known is the book Climate and Soil in Their Effect on Plant Life , which was first published in German in 1925.

In 1926 Lundegårdh became professor and head of the botany department of the Institute for Agricultural Research at Experimentalfaltet near Stockholm. There he conducted intensive research into the absorption of salt by plant roots, especially by those of wheat. He continued this work when he became a professor of plant physiology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences near Uppsala , where he remained until his retirement in 1955. During these years he developed the flame photometer , which he described in his book Die Blattanalyse from 1945. In 1938 he wrote a German-British botany dictionary together with the British botanist Eric Ashby .

In 1947 Henrik Lundegårdh had a private laboratory set up in Penningby, 70 kilometers north of Stockholm on the Baltic Sea . There he built a number of spectrophotometers and, after his retirement, made numerous discoveries about the role of cytochromes in roots and in photosynthesis . He had been concerned with this subject since the 1930s when he had an extensive correspondence with David Keilin of the University of Cambridge , UK , who discovered the cytochrome. His research had a great influence on the findings of the British chemist Peter D. Mitchell , who received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Chemistry . In 1943 Lundegårdh was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences , where in 1955 Keilin was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine . When the Swede Hugo Theorell received the Nobel Prize instead , Lundegårdh resigned from the academy in protest. In 1950 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1956 to the Académie des sciences in Paris and in 1964 to the National Academy of Sciences .

Personal

Lundegårdh was married twice. From his first marriage to Sigrid Svensson came a son. After the death of his first wife in 1943, he married Kraka Liljefors a second time in 1944 and fathered a daughter the following year.

Publications (selection)

• The geotropic behavior of the side rung. Harrassowitz Lund 1913
• Basics of a chemical-physical theory of life . Gustav Fischer Verlag Jena 1914
• Physiological studies on tree architecture . Gebr. Borntraeger Berlin 1916
• Cell and cytoplasm . Gebr. Borntraeger Berlin 1922
• About the carbon dioxide production and the gas permeability of the soil . Almqvist & Wiksell Stockholm 1923
• The carbonic acid cycle in nature . Gustav Fischer Verlag Jena 1924
• Climate and soil in their effect on plant life . Gustav Fischer Verlag Jena 1925
• The nutrient uptake of the plant . Gustav Fischer Verlag Jena 1932
• The leaf analysis . Gustav Fischer Verlag Jena 1945

Web links

• Anthony William Derek Larkum: "Contributions of Henrik Lundegårdh". In: Photosynthesis Research . Issue 76/2003. Pp. 105–110 (PDF; 249 kB)
• List of publications on runeberg.org

Individual evidence

1. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter L. Académie des sciences, accessed on January 16, 2020 (French).