Ivar Asbjørn Følling

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Ivar Asbjørn Følling (born August 23, 1888 in Kvam, today Steinkjer , † January 24, 1973 ) was a Norwegian chemist and doctor .

Life

Childhood and youth

Følling was born on a farm in central Norway, the youngest of seven children. From an early age it was a matter of course for him and his siblings to help out while working on their parents' farm. He first attended the village school and after completing the ninth grade was allowed to switch to the school in Trondheim , where he lived with his oldest sister. Here he completed the tenth to twelfth grade.

Upon graduating from high school, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and, in the absence of other effective treatments, had to rest for a year without any agricultural work or study. During that year he had a lot of thought about what to do with his life and decided not to become a farmer, but a scientist and doctor. His father did not want to allow him this path at first because the family was too poor to be able to finance a degree and his labor was also needed on the family farm. But Følling was very determined and negotiated with him that he could try to earn his studies by teaching younger students and come home to the farm in the summer to help with work.

Studies and academic career

So after graduating from the only and newly established Norwegian Technical University in Trondheim , Følling studied chemical engineering . After graduating in 1916, his family expected him to settle in Trondheim, if not on his parents' farm. However, Følling planned to continue his studies at the University of Oslo and asked for a small loan from his father, who gave it to him, believing it would be a jump starter for a career in the big capital. When he had to ask a year later again for financial support, confessed Følling at the urging of his brother that he attended the University of Christiania taught chemistry at the Dental Faculty and part medical study. Fortunately, the father admired his studied son and wished him well. Even after completing this degree in 1922, Følling continued to teach and research at the Faculty of Dentistry. In the following years he traveled a lot, held various positions as an assistant doctor and continued his education in England , Denmark and the USA , where he studied in 1928 with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation . In 1929 he received the degree of doctorate. In 1930 he made a second research trip to the USA and in 1931 he married his wife Guri, who accompanied him to Vienna for another research grant shortly after the wedding . In 1932 he was appointed Professor of Nutritional Science at the University of Oslo and in 1935 Professor of Physiology at the Veterinary College. From 1953 until his retirement in 1958 he was a professor of biochemistry and chief physician of the central laboratory at Rikshospitalet in Oslo.

plant

The name Føllings is primarily associated with the first discovery of a congenital metabolic disease, phenylketonuria . In Norwegian usage, this disease is usually called Følling's disease in his honor.

The parents of two children with mental retardation in Oslo had noticed a strange, musty odor from the urine of both siblings. They learned that Følling was doing research on metabolic diseases and, after several unsuccessful visits to the doctor in 1939, approached him with the question of whether there might be a connection between this noticeable odor and the disability of their children. Although Følling had never heard of such a connection, he agreed to examine the urine. When a urine sample was first examined from the older daughter, the usual samples for protein, blood, inflammatory cells and sugar were normal. When he spiked an acidified urine sample with ferric chloride solution in search of ketones , it turned dark green, a reaction he had never seen before. Apparently some unknown substance must be present in this urine. He also found the same noticeable reaction with ferric chloride in the younger brother. Now Følling began to look for the unknown substance, which he finally identified as phenylpyruvic acid. Since he had not forgotten the parents' original question as to whether there was a connection with the mental development disorder, he examined a total of 480 children in facilities for the care of the mentally handicapped in and around Oslo and found eight others with the abnormal elimination, two of them further sibling pairs. In the same year he published his findings in a Norwegian and a German specialist journal and initially called the disorder Imbecillitas phenylpyruvica, phenylpyruvic acid nonsense .

Awards

  • 1962 first winner of the Joseph P Kennedy International Award in Mental Retardation

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Følling A. On excretion of phenylpyruvic acid in the urine as a metabolic abnormality in connection with impropriety. Hoppe-Seyler’s Z Physiol Chem 1934; 227: 169-176
personal data
SURNAME Følling, Ivar Asbjørn
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fölling, Ivar Asbjörn
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Norwegian chemist and doctor
DATE OF BIRTH 23 August 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Kvam, today Steinkjer
DATE OF DEATH January 24, 1973