Joshua Harold Burn

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Joshua Harold Burn (born March 6, 1892 in Barnard Castle , County Durham in north-east England, † July 13, 1981 in Oxford ) was a British pharmacologist .

Life

Burn studied physiology at Cambridge University . In the First World War he was a soldier, then he finished his medical studies in London. From 1920 to 1926 he worked with Henry Hallett Dale at the National Institute for Medical Research in Hampstead . In 1926 he became director of the pharmacological laboratory of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain , in 1933 dean of the College of the Pharmaceutical Society at the University of London , where he was joined by Edith Bülbring , a student of the Berlin pharmacologist Paul Trendelenburg , who had left Germany because of National Socialism . From 1937 to 1959 Burn held the Chair of Pharmacology at Oxford University . From 1943 Hermann Blaschko worked with him, also a refugee from National Socialist Germany. After the war, Burn made his institute on South Parks Road a center for the training of pharmacologists. Over the years he had 162 research assistants. These included Edward Miles Vaughan Williams, who introduced a classification of antiarrhythmics named after him , Michael Rand (1927–2002), later head of pharmacology in Melbourne , Australia, and John Robert Vane (1927–2004), one of three Nobel Prize winners for Physiology or Medicine 1982. This also included young scientists from the German-speaking area such as Albrecht Fleckenstein (1917–1992), Ullrich Trendelenburg (1922–2006), Hans-Joachim Schümann (1919–1998) and Oleh Hornykiewicz (* 1926), who found connection to international research here.

plant

As director of the Pharmacological Society's Pharmacological Laboratory , Burn was responsible for ensuring drug quality. He began with a standardization of Strophanthus - tincture in collaboration with John William Trevan (1887-1956), the statistical methods introduced in the laboratory. This was followed by standardization of posterior pituitary extracts and insulin . These efforts culminated in the book Methods of Biological Assay in 1928 , which was expanded to appear in German in 1937.

There was also basic research. From 1930 Burn became more and more interested in the pharmacology of the vegetative nervous system . He found that in the sympathetic except vasoconstrictor and vasodilator are nerve fibers. Together with Edith Bülbring, he observed in 1938 that cutting through the sympathetic nerves of an organ drastically changed its sensitivity to sympathomimetics , a phenomenon that preoccupied him and neurobiologists in general for decades. Burns' misinterpretation became just as famous as his discoveries: from numerous findings he concluded that the postganglionic neurons of the sympathetic nervous system primarily release acetylcholine , and acetylcholine then releases the neurotransmitter norepinephrine secondarily . This cholinergic link hypothesis is abandoned today and the direct release of norepinephrine is assured.

After his retirement, Burn wrote several books, including a small one for physiology and pharmacology students on the autonomic nervous system and one for laypeople, drugs, medicines and man , which have been translated into eight languages, including German.

recognition

Burn received honorary doctorates from Yale University , Mainz University , and Bradford University . He was an honorary member of the British Pharmacological Society , the German Pharmacological Society and the Czechoslovak Medical Society Jan Evangelista Purkyně as well as a member of the Leopoldina and a Fellow of the Royal Society . In 1960 he received the Gairdner Foundation International Award , in 1967 the Schmiedeberg plaque from the German Pharmacological Society and in 1979 the Wellcome Gold Medal from the British Pharmacological Society .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edith Bülbring and JM Walker: Joshua Harold Burn 6 March 1892-13 July 1981 . In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 1984; 30: 45-89
  2. ↑ Marthe Vogt: Obituary Joshua Harold Burn (1892-1981) . In: Reviews of Physiology, Biochemistry and Pharmacology 1982; 94: 1-10
  3. ↑ JR Vane: JH Burn: an appreciation. In: British journal of pharmacology. Volume 75, Number 1, January 1982, pp. 3-7, PMID 7042023 , PMC 2071473 (free full text).
  4. ↑ Ullrich Trendelenburg: Joshua Harold Burn (March 6, 1892– July 13, 1981). In: Trends in Pharmacological Sciences 1982; 3: 91-92
  5. ↑ JH Burn: Biological evaluation methods . German translation by Dr. Edith Bulbring. Berlin, Julius Springer Verlag 1937
  6. ^ JH Burn and MJ Rand: Sympathetic postganglionic mechanism . In: Nature (London ) 1959; 163-165
  7. ^ E. Muscholl, From the cholinergic link to the cholinergic antilink in adrenergic transmission: the muscarinic inhibitory mechanism . In: Trends in Pharmacological Sciences (1980) 1: 381-382
  8. ^ J. Harold Burn: The Autonomic Nervous System . Oxford, Blackwell Scientific Publications 1963
  9. ↑ Harold Burn: Drugs, Medicines and Us . Translated from English by Beate Edelmann. Zurich, Orell Füssli Verlag 1962
personal data
SURNAME Burn, Joshua Harold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British pharmacologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 6, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Barnard Castle
DATE OF DEATH July 13, 1981
Place of death Oxford