Lina Solomonovna star

Lina Stern (around 1910)

Lina Solomonovna Star ( Russian Лина Соломоновна Штерн * 14 ^{. Jul} / 26. August  1878 ^greg. In Liepaja , Russian empire , † 8. March 1968 in Moscow ) was a Soviet physiologist and biologist . She was the first woman to be accepted into the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1939 and was a leading member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during World War II . Since 2018, the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences has organized the Stern-Gattiker Prize every year, which honors women in academic medicine and aims to motivate young women.

Life

Lina Stern completed her studies at the University of Geneva , where she was the first woman to receive the rank of professor in 1918 . As a professor of biochemistry, she specialized in research on cellular respiration . This and similar work led to the discovery of the so-called citric acid cycle in the 1930s .

In 1925 she went to the Soviet Union, where she received a professorship in physiology at the Second Medical Institute of Lomonosov University in Moscow. From 1929 to 1948 she was the director of the Physiological Scientific Research Institute in Moscow. In 1932 she was elected a member of the Leopoldina , and in 1939 she was the first woman to be admitted to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR .

During the German-Soviet War , Stern was a member of the Jewish Antifascist Committee founded in 1942 and received the Stalin Prize in 1943 . In the course of the elimination of the committee, she lost her jobs, was arrested in January 1949 and sentenced to 3 ½ years in prison in June 1952 in a secret trial for espionage, anti-Soviet activities and the preparation of terrorist attacks. The co-defendants were shot on the “ Night of the Murdered Poets ”, but Stern was exiled to Kazakhstan , taking into account their 3 ½ years of pre-trial detention . After Josef Stalin's death , she was allowed to return to her functions in Moscow in 1953. In 1958, when she was 80 years old, Stern's legal rehabilitation took place .

Lina Stern's main research activity was the blood-brain barrier , which she called the haemato-encephalic barrier in 1921 . Furthermore, she researched the physiology of the central nervous system , sleep disorders , the endocrine system, catalase and described the exchange of blood in the plexus . She published treatises in German and Russian, including Die Katalase (1910, with Federico Battelli) and On the Mechanism of Oxidation Processes in Animal Organisms (1944).

Fonts

• Autobiography (1929), in: Elga Kern (Ed.): Leading Women in Europe , Munich 1999 [1928], pp. 206–210

literature

• Encyclopedia Judaica . Vol. 15, p. 388 f.
• Jean Jacques Dreifuss: Stern, Lina. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Jean-Jacques Dreifuss, Natalia Tikhonov: Lina Stern (1878–1968): Physiologist and biochemist, first professor at the University of Geneva and victim of Stalinist trials. (PDF; 312 kB) In: Schweizerische Ärztezeitung , Vol. 86, 2005, No. 26, pp. 1594–1597.
• John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , Sp. 778.

Web links

Commons : Lina Stern  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Stern-Gattiker-Preis on the SAMS website