Max Delbrück (biophysicist)

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Max Delbrück

Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück (born September 4, 1906 in Berlin ; † March 9, 1981 in Pasadena , California ) was a German , from 1945 American geneticist , biophysicist and Nobel Prize winner .

Life

family

Max Delbrück belonged to the originally from Alfeld on a leash coming Lower Saxony Delbrück family , which in the 19th century in Prussia and the German Empire held several influential positions. He is the youngest son of the historian Hans Delbrück (1848–1929) and Carolina (Lina) Thiersch , a granddaughter of the chemist Justus von Liebig (1803–1873), the founder of the baronial house of the old Hessian family Liebig , who was a sister-in-law of the Theologian Adolf von Harnack was. The chemist Max Delbrück is his uncle.

Delbrück was married to Mary Bruce since 1941. The couple had four children.

education and profession

Delbrück's place of work in Berlin: Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry (today: Hahn-Meitner-Bau der FU Berlin , Thielallee 63)
Memorial plaque on the house at Thielallee 63 in Berlin-Dahlem
Max Delbrück during his time at Vanderbilt University

Delbrück studied at the University of Goettingen first astronomy . On the choice of this subject he said:

“I wanted an area that would set me apart most of all from other members of the family. I come from a very personal family. I was the very youngest, and nobody else knew anything about science and even less about astronomy. "

- Max Delbrück

Delbrück came to theoretical physics through the newly discovered quantum mechanics . He received his doctorate in this field in 1930 . In the physical field, Delbrück scattering in quantum electrodynamics (scattering of high-energy photons at the Coulomb field of a nucleus via the generation and destruction of electron-positron pairs) is named after him.

After several stays abroad, he worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem from 1932 , among other things as an assistant to Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn . The non-state institute retained a certain independence even under the rule of National Socialism and thus attracted international researchers.

At the suggestion of Niels Bohr , he turned to interdisciplinary work with biology , which he later commented as follows:

“In the mid-30s, the theoretical physicists, especially Bohr, were interested in the riddle of life. After all, it's a strange thing that humans make humans, cats make cats, and corn makes corn. That doesn't seem to be in physics and chemistry. Atoms do not make the same atoms. "

- Max Delbrück

In 1935, together with the geneticist Nikolai Timofejew-Ressowski and the physicist Karl Günther Zimmer, he published a work on gene mutations in which they were the first to propose that genes be understood as complex atomic groups. This is how modern genetics began .

In 1937 the political influence on research had become too great; Delbrück first emigrated to the USA as a research fellow. There he carried out research at Caltech and from 1945 offered summer courses in New York City that were well received by experts . When the scholarship expired in the fall of 1939, he received a physics professorship at Vanderbilt University in Nashville through the use of colleagues . From 1947 Delbrück worked again at Caltech - on bacteriophages . In the late 1940s he worked closely with Salvador Luria , with whom, among other things, he clarified the reproduction process of bacteriophages in the Luria-Delbrück experiment . He also soon exchanged information with Alfred Day Hershey . With their research, the three scientists created the foundations of modern molecular biology and genetics.

For this he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969 together with Hershey and Luria .

“The whole thing about the Nobel Prize is such a funny thing. Suddenly overnight you become a television star. How do you get there? You come to it like a virgin to a child. You don't know how. "

- Max Delbrück

In 1949 Delbrück was elected to the National Academy of Sciences , 1959 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and 1978 to the Académie des Sciences . As a biology professor at Caltech (until 1977) he continued research in several areas. In addition to sensory physiology , the focus was on quantum chemistry and mutations , for example in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster .

In 1947 Delbrück traveled to Germany again for the first time, but did not move there again. One of his first post-war students in Germany was the geneticist Carsten Bresch . Starting in 1958, Bresch, commissioned by Delbrück , built up the Institute for Genetics at the University of Cologne with funding from the Volkswagen Foundation , which the Cologne botanist Joseph Straub had developed . From 1961 to 1963 Delbrück conducted research at the new Cologne institute and helped to establish it. This first molecular genetic-oriented research institute in Germany served as a model for the establishment of further such institutes. In 1969 he helped the University of Konstanz to set up its biological faculty. In 1963 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina learned society , with whose Gregor Mendel Medal he was awarded in 1967.

Delbrück's merit in the broader sense was above all the introduction of mathematical models and scientific methods into biology. His appeal for interdisciplinarity and open cooperation among the scientific community, which he supported with his own example, set a course and earned him recognition.

Honors

See also

Works

  • Quantitative information on the theory of the homeopolar bond (= Annalen der Physik . Volume 5, Volume 5. 1930, No. 1, pp. 36–58). JA Barth, Leipzig 1930, DNB 570074754 , OCLC 793769533 (Dissertation doctoral Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen 1930, 22 pages)
  • About the nature of the gene mutation and the gene structure with Nikolai Wladimirowitsch Timofejew-Ressowski and Karl Günter Zimmer. Weidmann, Berlin 1935, OCLC 73076219 .
  • Truth and Reality: About the Evolution of Knowledge . Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1986, ISBN 3-89136-058-4 .
  • The pipette is my clarinet. Original sound recordings 1954–1979 , ed. v. Klaus Sander. Audio CD, 65 min. supposé, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-932513-75-6 .
  • A physicist looks at biology again - twenty years later , In: Wissenschaft und progress, 20, Heft 4, 172-174 (1970); German translation by Max Delbrück: A Physicist's Renewed Look at Biology: Twenty Years Later , in: Science , 12 June, 168, 1312-1315 (1970).
  • Preface to the German edition . In: John Cairns , Gunther S. Stent , James D. Watson (ed.), Erhard Geißler (ed. Of the German edition): Phages and the development of molecular biology . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin (East) 1972, pp. 7-10.

literature

  • John Cairns, Gunther S. Stent, James D. Watson (Eds.): Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology , CSHL Press, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, 1992, ISBN 0-87969-595-1 ( English ).
  • Ernst Peter Fischer : The atom of biologists. Max Delbrück and the Origin of Molecular Genetics. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1988, ISBN 3-492-10759-1 .
  • Erhard Geißler : "No West German translation for political and technical reasons ..." Memories of Max Delbrück's influence on GDR genetics , in: Michael Kaasch, Joachim Kaasch (ed.): The becoming of the living . Contributions to the 18th annual meeting of the DGGTB in Halle (Saale) 2009 (= Negotiations on the History and Theory of Biology , Volume 16). VWB Verlag for Science and Education, Berlin 2010, pp. 169–201, ISBN 978-3-86135-396-6 .
  • Erhard Geißler: Drosophila or the temptation: a GDR geneticist against cancer and biological weapons . Autobiography , BWV Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-8305-1862-4 .
  • Simone Wenkel: Molecular Biology in Germany from 1945 to 1975 - An International Comparison . University and City Library Cologne 2014, DNB 1049523393 (Dissertation University Cologne 2014, reviewers: Ute Deichmann , Thomas Wiehe; full text PDF, free of charge, 250 pages, 1,485 kB).

Individual evidence

  1. a b c Martin Winkelheide : Only the algae fungus puzzle remained unsolved. In: Calendar sheet (broadcast on Deutschlandfunk ). March 9, 2011, accessed March 9, 2011 .
  2. ^ William Hayes: Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück . In: National Academy of Sciences (Ed.): Biographical Memoir . Washington DC 1993, p. 72 .
  3. Max-Delbrück-Str.

Web links

Commons : Max Delbrück  - Collection of images, videos and audio files