Otto Folin

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Otto Folin

Otto Knut Olof Folin (born April 4, 1867 in Åseda , † October 25, 1934 in Boston ) was a Swedish-American chemist and physiological chemist and pioneer of clinical biochemistry.

Life

Otto Folin was the son of a tanner . Born in Sweden as the youngest of twelve sons and a daughter of a family with a small estate in Småland , he moved to the USA at the age of 15 shortly after his confirmation , because two brothers and an aunt already lived in Minnesota . Folin had learned some German in Sweden. He acquired and deepened his English skills not only at a school in Stillwater , but also during various student jobs near the St. Croix Boom Site .

He attended to study chemistry at the University of Minnesota from 1888 to 1892, where Julius Stieglitz was one of the supervisors. Folin became a US citizen in 1890. The subsequent work in Ernst Leopold Salkowski's laboratory as part of his doctoral studies from 1892 to 1898 in the field of organic chemistry resulted in a thesis on the determination of uric acid . From 1897 to 1898 he deepened his knowledge of physiological chemistry at the University of Uppsala , from which his first scientific publication in " Hoppe-Seyler's Zeitschrift für Physiologische Chemie " resulted. Then he worked in Albrecht Kossel's laboratory at the University of Marburg .

Back in the USA, he made his Ph.D. with his dissertation On Urethans. at the University of Chicago in 1898. After he became an assistant professor at West Virginia University and moved to Morgantown, West Virginia , on September 11, 1899, he married Laura Churchill Grant, who had made her MA in economics in 1896 . The daughter Teresa from this marriage later graduated from the School of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University , the son Grant, like his father Otto, was a hobby golfer and became a businessman in Detroit, while the other daughter Joanna died in 1912. In 1900 Folin went to McLean Hospital in Belmont , Massachusetts , where he was able to set up a new laboratory for physiological chemistry. There he developed analysis methods for urine and blood. In 1903, at Massachusetts General Hospital, a benign tumor in his face was removed , cutting a nerve, which permanently changed his appearance. In 1905, a publication brought him widespread scientific recognition in which he found that the amount of creatinine in urine does not depend on the amount of protein ingested with food - in contrast to urea, for which such a connection exists.

In 1907 he was appointed assistant professor at the Medical School of Harvard University and two years later there professor of biochemistry. In his laboratory he took on several students and staff, including George Richards Minot . Further work led to the development of the Folin reagent (for the determination of amines ) and the Folin-Ciocalteu reagent , which also enabled the protein determination according to Lowry . In 1909 he became president of the American Society of Biological Chemists, which was later renamed the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. In 1911 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1916 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences . The Washington University in St. Louis awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1915, the University of Chicago followed in 1916 and the University of Lund in 1918. In 1932 he became a member of the Imperial Leopoldine-Carolinian German Academy of Sciences .

His last publication appeared in 1934 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry , of which he was co-editor for many years. He died of a myocardial infarction.

Works

  • Otto Folin: Laboratory manual of biological chemistry, 1919
  • Otto Folin: Preservatives and Other Chemicals in Foods, 1923

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personal data
SURNAME Folin, Otto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Folin, Otto Knut Olof (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swedish-American biochemist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH April 4, 1867
PLACE OF BIRTH Åseda
DATE OF DEATH October 25, 1934
Place of death Boston