Louis Blaringhem

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Louis Blaringhem, President of the Académie des Sciences

Louis Joseph Florimond Blaringhem (born February 1, 1878 in Locon in the Pas-de-Calais department , † January 1, 1958 in Paris ) was a French botanist and agronomist . Through his work at the Sorbonne in the 1920s in the field of genetic selection , hybridization and plant germination, he is considered one of the pioneers of modern genetics . He was Maître des Conférences at one of the two elite schools in France, the ENS in Paris, was appointed Chef de Service of the renowned Pasteur Institute in 1909 and was elected President of the Académie des Sciences (French Academy of Sciences ) in 1947 .

Education and academic career

Blaringhem grew up in modest circumstances as the youngest boy of six siblings. His father, Louis Désiré, like his father, was a primary school teacher and his mother, Marie Devaux, came from a farming family in Douvrin . He spent a happy and sheltered childhood in the country and had anything but school in mind. At the age of seven he preferred to hide in his aunt Julie's counter when it came to learning to read and write. His father did nothing by “threatening or hitting” - except that he shouted: “I want to be like Maniche ”. Maniche was a simple farm worker! Thank God, there was a Monsieur Dieu, his father's teacher colleague, who gave little Louis a taste for books. His hunger for learning prompted his father to teach him Latin and Greek before sending him to the Collège de Béthune . The young Louis Blaringhem was particularly impressed by the fact that his father had received an award from the French National Ministry of Education in 1895 and from the French Ministry of Agriculture in 1896 for the systematic implementation of plant tests (including potatoes and tobacco). So education was a top priority in the family - two of his brothers became engineers and another veterinarian. 1895 Louis left Bethune as a Bachelor (comparable: high school graduate ) and completed in 1891, a year in special mathematics at the Lycée Faidherbe in Lille before joining the elite schools polytechnique École and Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) in Paris competed. Both accepted him practically at the same time, but chose the latter and had a remarkable academic career. In 1902 he became a research assistant, in 1903 he was the best graduate of the state examination in natural sciences. In the same year he received his teaching qualification for geology and botany at the ENS, and in 1907 he obtained a doctorate in natural sciences, whereupon he was immediately given responsibility for the scientific faculty in Paris. Two years later he was Chef de Service at the Pasteur Institute and director of the Arboretum de la Mauléverie botanical garden near Angers. In 1912 he was appointed professor of agriculture at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) and held this chair until 1922. In 1928, Blaringhem was accepted as the youngest member of the Académie des Sciences, although it was only 50 years old. In 1930 he was first Maître de Conference and then professeur titulaire at the Sorbonne until his retirement in 1949.

Live and act

Louis Blaringhem embodies the typical figure of a French biological researcher of the early 20th century who initially did not attach any importance to the rediscovery of Mendel's laws . Rather, he built on the inheritance theory of a so-called Neo-Lamarckianism and was inspired by evolutionary research , which Hugo de Vries , one of the rediscoverers of Mendel's rules, gave new impulses with his mutation theory . Because of this, and his special gift of constantly comparing empirical research results with theories of science, he changed his mind. In the period between the two world wars, he became one of the leading scholars in the introduction of Mendelism in France, and a pioneer of modern genetics in the field of tension between basic research and applied science. As early as 1903, Louis Blaringhem had completed an internship at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen and worked with Carl Jacobsen (son of the founder of the Danish brewery Carlsberg) and Professor Wilhelm Johannsen , the creator of the term gene as a working hypothesis for a new (empirical) botanical discipline that rapidly for industrial processes (pharmacy, brewing, food industry) became more and more important. From the Société d'encouragement de la culture des orges de Brasserie en France (in German about: French Society for the Promotion of the Cultivation of Malting Barley ) he was on a scientific mission in 1904 to the Herman Nilsson-Ehle to the research institute for seeds in Svalöf ( Sweden) : Here he learned the techniques of controlled genealogical cultivation. After his return he organized the genetic selection of the brewery barley destined for the French maltsters . At this time, Blaringhem also began to rent and plow fields in the area around Paris in order to systematically research the genealogy of maize and barley through perennial planting (until around 1911). Every summer he traveled to the Botanical Garden in Amsterdam to work with him on the mutation and hybridization of evening primrose ( Oenothera ) at the invitation of Hugo de Vries .

In 1907, in an initially controversial doctoral thesis, he proposed the changes in the genetic make-up caused by trauma (i.e. damage of all kinds, including exposure to harmful radiation) of the seeds. Under the title Action des traumatismes sur la variation et hérédité. Mutation et traumatismes. it became his first of about 300 subsequent scientific publications. At the same time he translated the second edition of the work Espèces et variétés that year ; leur origine par mutation by Hugo De Vries and was responsible for a course on agricultural biology at the Faculté des Sciences de Paris . Just a year later he began researching tobacco plants under the Pasteur student Émile Roux in order to find more economical production methods for nicotine. Professor Roux hired a chemist for this team to precisely measure the nicotine content and thus analyze the effects in pure and hybrid tobacco varieties. Blaringhem's work was funded by the Bonaparte Fund by the Academy of Sciences until 1910. In the course of this work, which was extended to more and more areas of nutrition, he participated in 1909 together with the director of the Société sucrière de Bourdon ( department Puy-de-Dôme ) on the wheat varieties especially suitable for the pasta industry. In 1909, Èmile Roux entrusted him with the post of Chef de Service at the Pasteur Institute, which practically included the post of director of the botanical garden in Angers (Arboretum de la Maulévrie). Here he started the selection of certain guinea pig strains according to the inheritance of their fur colors and any existing connections to a special resistance to poisoning and bacterial infections. Now, alongside G. Bohn, M. Caullery, Ch. Julin, F. Mesnil, Ch. Pérez and Et. Rabaud, he was also responsible for the publication of the scientific bulletin for the states of France and Belgium and became a member of the board Circle of editors of the Revue critique des livres nouveeaux ; which may be regarded as the supreme body for the maintenance and control of the printed French language during this time. In that year he also filled the position of secretary in the French 'Societé de Biologie'. In the course of its increasingly internationally recognized scientific importance, he became co-editor of the monthly magazine for inductive descent and inheritance theory of the German botanist Erwin Baur at the University of Berlin.

Between 1914 and 1918, as with so many others , the First World War was at the center of Blaringhem's life. Drafted as a Caporal or Sergent (private) , he then served as an adjudant (sergeant) in the 6e régiment territorial d'infantrie , then joined the brigade des fusiliers marins until 1915 and temporarily held the title of artillery officer before entering service aircraft production (1915–1918) was assigned. At the end of the war, he was subsequently promoted to commander.

After the war, he returned to full academic life and was delegated to the renowned Harvard University as an exchange professor from the University of Paris . At the same time, the directorate of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) appointed him to head a survey on technical education in the United States. As a delegate of the ENS, he worked from 1922 to 1929 as Maître de conférences de botanique (a kind of head of department) at the Sorbonne. During this time, he also published his much-acclaimed work Pasteur et le transformisme (1923), his appointment as President of the French Language Section at the 5th International Congress of Genetics in Berlin (1927), and his entry as a member of the French Academy of Sciences as the successor to the botanist Léon Guinard (botany section) and his nomination as director of the Maison Franco-Japonaise (Franco-Japanese house) in Tokyo. On this occasion he toured the states of Southeast Asia extensively. His international reputation and the connections he made in Asia - here he also met the Chinese botanist and agronomist Li Yuying , who was trained in France - earned him the honorary presidency of the Grand congrès du soja (World Soy Congress) in Paris at the side of Lis, who was then rector of the University of Peking, and the French Overseas Minister, Marius Moutet . On the occasion of his appointment as President of the French Academy of Sciences in 1947, he gave up his personal professorship in botany at the Sorbonne and from then on devoted himself to the things that were close to his heart until the end of his life, including the ENS and funding of education. In his retirement (from 1948) he maintained a small laboratory at the Sorbonne and also retained his post as director of the botanical garden Arboretum Gaston Allard in Angers. Louis Blaringhem passed away in 1958 after a fulfilling working and research life. He was buried with great honor on Epiphany in a family vault in his beloved birthplace.

Appreciation

Louis Blaringhem was named Chevalier de la légion d'honneur à titre militaire (Knight of the French Legion of Honor ) for his services during the First World War . Against the background of his botanical knowledge, his scientific systematics and various practical series of experiments, he helped the French armaments industry to find solutions to problems and improvements in various areas. For example, he found out that the wood of the elm is much better suited for propeller production than the beech wood that was previously used. For this he was awarded the French Croix de guerre in 1916 .

During his stays in Japan at the end of the 1920s, the Japanese Emperor Hirohito , who held him in high regard as a scientist and had read all of his books, received him repeatedly for personal audiences.

In 1930 he was given a personal chair at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Publications

Louis Blaringhem has published very actively after the publication of his dissertation. A few examples of his more than 300 published titles are listed here:

  • Mutation et traumatismes , Paris, 1907 (his dissertation)
  • Les transformations brusques des êtres vivants , Paris, Ernest Flammarion, 1911
  • Le perfectionnement des plantes , Paris, Ernest Flammarion, 1913
  • Lesproblemèmes de l'hérédité expérimentale , Paris, Ernest Flammarion, 1919
  • Pasteur et le transformisme , Paris, Masson, 1923
  • Principes et formules de l'hérédité mendélienne , Paris, Gauthier-Villars, 1928
  • Caractères morphologiques et anatomiques utilisés pour la classification des Phanérogames et des Cryptogames vasculaires , Cours professé à la Faculté des sciences de Paris, 1929–1930
  • Les inflorescences et les fleurs , Cours professé à la Faculté des sciences de Paris, 1930–1931

See also

  • Institut Pasteur [2] (English, French)

literature

  • Hugo de Vries, Espèces et variétés, leur naissance par mutation, traduit de l'anglais par Louis Blaringhem, Bibliothèque scientifique internationale, Paris, Librairies Félix Alcan et Guillaumin réunies, 1909
  • Marion Thomas, Louis Blaringhem (1878–1958), un généticien néo-lamarckien (in German: a neo-Lamarckist geneticist), in: Ruralia [En ligne], 08 | 2001, created on July 25, 2005, accessed on May 8, 2012. URL: [3]
  • Eberhard-Metzger, Claudia, The Molecule of Life. Introduction to Genetics, Munich 1999.
  • Paul Kammerer, Inheritance of Forced Reproductive Adaptations, Berlin 1908
  • Denis Buican, Histoire de la génétique et de l'évolutionnisme en France, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1984
  • Christophe Charle et Eva Telkes, Les professeurs de la Faculté des sciences de Paris. Dictionnaire biographique, 1901–1939, Histoire biographique de l'enseignement, Paris, Institut national de la recherche pédagogique / Center national de la recherche scientifique, 1994, pp. 42-44
  • Wilhelm Ludvig Johanssen, Limitations of natural selection on pure lines, Copenhagen (1909)
  • Jean Gayon et Doris T. Zallen and Richard M. Burian, The singular fate of Genetics in the History of French Biology, 1900-1940 in Journal of History of Biology, volume 2, n ° 3, Springer New York, 1988, pp. 357-402
  • Jean-Louis Fischer and Villiam Schneider [dir.], Histoire de la génétique. Pratiques, techniques et théories, Paris, Édition ARPEM, 1989

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Not to be confused with the German titular professor who, in contrast to France, does not have to include an academic qualification
  2. ↑ [1] see: Michel Fournier, Yannick Portebois, 'La langue est au peuple et la grammaire chez les écrivains': la Revue critique des livres nouveaux, trente années de comptes rendus linguisitiques (1833–1863), L'information grammaticale, June 2001.
  3. ↑ The Societé de Biologie can be compared with the German Association for Biology, Biosciences and Biomedicine in Germany
  4. ↑ eulogy of the French botanist and member of the Academy of Sciences and the Executive Board of the Collège de France, Lucien Plantefol

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Blaringhem, Louis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bleringham, Louis Joseph Florimond (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French scientist and geneticist
DATE OF BIRTH February 1, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Locon
DATE OF DEATH January 1, 1958
Place of death Paris