Max Bergmann (chemist)

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Max Bergmann (born February 12, 1886 in Fürth , † November 7, 1944 in New York ) was a German-American chemist.

Life

Max Bergmann was born as the seventh child of the coal wholesalers Salomon and Rosalie Bergmann. After graduating from high school in Fürth, he first studied biology at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and then turned to organic chemistry, with Adolf von Baeyer's lectures increasing his interest in the subject. In 1907 he moved to Berlin to continue studying chemistry, where Emil Fischer , one of Baeyer's students, taught, and graduated in 1911 with a doctorate on acyl (poly) sulfide under Ignaz Bloch . Fischer became aware of Bergmann and initially took him on as an assistant, and in 1912 as a private assistant. 1921 became a minerhabilitation . In 1920 he was appointed by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society to head the organic department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Fiber Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem (“Reginald Oliver Herzog Institute”) and as deputy director of the institute.

In 1922, after Fischer's suicide in 1919, he gave his autobiography From my life, which lasted until around 1900 . Written out in the unlucky year of 1918 .

In 1922 he became the founding director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Leather Research in Dresden and became a "Scientific Member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society". Due to his Jewish origin , he was dismissed from the National Socialist regime under the Professional Civil Service Act and had to emigrate. Bergmann moved to the USA and worked at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York . There he was the Principal Scientist in Protein Chemistry and was instrumental in helping the United States achieve a top position in the field of molecular biology . According to Bergmann, proteins are active inheritable material of the chromosomes . Two later Nobel Prize winners ( Vincent du Vigneaud and William Howard Stein ) worked in his laboratory .

Bergmann's successor as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Leather Research in Dresden was the chemist Wolfgang Grassmann in June 1934 , who initially retained this position after its destruction and in post-war Germany in the follow-up institute, the Max Planck Institute for Protein and Leather Research in Regensburg and from 1957 in Munich.

The basic researcher Bergmann is considered a pioneer in applied science. He specialized in deciphering protein and peptide structures and also researched their synthesis. He worked closely with his student Leonidas Zervas .

Bergmann was married twice: first with Emmy Bergmann , a cousin, and then with Martha Suter, with whom he emigrated to the USA. With Emmy Bergmann he had a son, Peter Bergmann , who became known as a physicist.

Honors

In 1932 Bergmann was admitted to the Leopoldina Academic Academy .

Since 1980 the Max Bergmann Circle (MBK) has awarded the Max Bergmann Medal for outstanding scientific achievements in the field of peptide chemistry.

In 2002, the Max Bergmann Center for Biomaterials was founded in Dresden as a joint research facility of the Leibniz Institute for Polymer Research and the Technical University of Dresden .

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. biographical data, publications and Academic pedigree of Max Bergmann at academictree.org, accessed on January 6, 2018th
  2. Winfried R. Pötsch, Annelore Fischer and Wolfgang Müller with the assistance of Heinz Cassebaum : Lexicon of important chemists , VEB Bibliographisches Institut Leipzig, 1988, p. 40, ISBN 3-323-00185-0 .
  3. Max Bergmann (ed.), Emil Fischer: From my life. Written in the unlucky year of 1918 . Berlin, Julius Springer, 1922. Version freely available online (mostly without footnotes) , printed editions, etc. a. 2011 ISBN 9783861955306 , 2013 ISBN 9781484023198 .
  4. see Kazemi / Henning, Chronicle of the KWG and MPG, page 960.
  5. Florian Schmaltz: Warfare agent research in National Socialism: on cooperation between Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, the military and industry , (= History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in National Socialism, Volume 11), Wallstein Verlag, 2005, p. 295.