Mahmoud Latifi

Mahmoud Latifi (born November 24, 1929 in Kermanshah , † November 23, 2005 in Tehran ) was an Iranian herpetologist . He was considered the leading exponent of snake research (ophiology) in Iran, published the first book about the Iranian snake fauna and directed the first production of antisera against snake poisons in his homeland.

Live and act

Latifi was born in Kermanshah on the Iranian-Iraqi border. Because of the unstable political situation in this region, he lived in Iraq for fourteen years , where he attended elementary school from 1936 to 1942. In 1942, the Kermanshah family returned, where Latifi graduated from secondary school in 1948. He then completed a degree at the Veterinary College in Tehran, where he graduated in 1953. In 1955 he became a research assistant at the Institut d'Etat des Serums et Vaccins Razi, which is located in Hesarak, a suburb of Tehran. Initially he manufactured vaccines against diphtheria and tetanus , from 1958 he specialized in the manufacture of antidotes obtained from the blood plasma of horses that had previously been injected with highly diluted snake venom.

With a grant from the World Health Organization (WHO), Latifi visited Brazil in May 1959, where he conducted research with Alphonse Richard Hoge at the Instituto Butantan in São Paulo . In 1960 he traveled to the United States and Europe for further studies. In 1963, Latifi became the director of the herpetological department and head of the antidotes department at the Institut d'Etat des Serums et Vaccins Razi. In 1968, with renewed support from WHO, he traveled to various snake institutes and herpetological museum collections in Europe and Asia. In 1978 he became a research professor at the Institut d'Etat des Serums et Vaccins Razi.

Between 1965 and 1989, Latifi published a dozen professional articles on reptiles. During his previous research, he dealt with the biochemistry of snake venom (using electrophoresis , gel diffusion and neutralization techniques to characterize the venom of different species), methods of preparation of antidotes, and the yield of snake venom. He led studies on the geographic variation of the venom of the common sand-rattle otter ( Echis carinatus ) in Africa and Asia. Starting with his research at Hoge in Brazil and then with Carl Gans in the United States, Latifi focused on the basic biology, distribution and identification of snakes.

In 1985, Latifi summarized his vast knowledge of the Iranian snake fauna in his work Snakes of Iran . It was initially published in Persian and is based on his research at the Razi Institute, in which around 128,000 snake samples were examined between 1959 and 1983. In this book, Latifi describes around 62 species. It is divided into two sections. In the first section he describes the basic biology and the body structure of the Iranian snakes, gives an overview of their poisons and gives statistics about the incidents of snake bites in Iran. The second part includes a checklist and a key about the Iranian snake fauna with descriptions of the species as well as descriptions of their way of life and their distribution. The work has 22 illustrations that were made by the US animal artist Raymond S. Robinson.

In 1991 the two American herpetologists Alan E. Leviton and George Robert Zug published an English translation with an extended checklist appendix and a bibliographic index. In 1992, Latifi published a revised second edition in Persian, in which the checklist appendix was adopted by Leviton and Zug. In 2001 a third edition appeared in Persian, which is twice as extensive as the second.

Dedication names

In 1967 Robert Mertens , Ilja Sergejewitsch Darewski (1924–2009) and Konrad Klemmer honored Latifi in the type epithet of the Elbour 's mountain otter ( Montivipera latifii ). In 1972 Alan E. Leviton and Steven C. Andersen named the dwarf gecko species Microgecko latifi after Latifi.

literature

• Kraig Adler (Ed.): Contributions to the History of Herpetology , Volume 3, Contributions to Herpetology Volume 29, Society for the study of amphibians and reptiles, 2012. ISBN 978-0-916984-82-3 . Pp. 339-340
• Bo Beolens, Michael Watkins, Michael Grayson: The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD 2011, ISBN 978-1-4214-0135-5 , p. 151

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Different life data: “Dr. Mahmoud Latifi (1930-2006), Iranian herpetologist ”. In: The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles , 2011.