Otto Riesser

Otto Riesser (born  July 9, 1882 in Frankfurt am Main ; † December 1, 1949 there ) was a German pharmacologist and physiologist of Jewish descent.

He worked from 1921 to 1928 as a professor of pharmacology and institute director at the Prussian University of Greifswald and then until 1934 in the same position at the Silesian Friedrich Wilhelms University .

After his release under the Nuremberg Laws , he first went to the Swiss Research Institute for High Mountain Climates and Medicine in Davos. In April 1939 he emigrated to the Netherlands , where he got a job at the Pharmacotherapeutic Institute of the Universiteit van Amsterdam .

He returned to Germany after the Second World War and participated in the reconstruction of higher education in Hesse and pharmacological research in Germany.

origin

Riesser's parents were the financial scientist Jakob Riesser and his wife Emilie geb. Edinger born. Prominent family members were the member of the Frankfurt National Assembly Gabriel Riesser , a brother of his paternal grandfather, and the neurologist and neuroanatomist Ludwig Edinger , a brother of his mother. Hans Eduard Riesser , Otto Riesser's younger brother, worked as a diplomat for the Foreign Office from 1918–1933 and 1950–1955 .

Life

Otto Riesser graduated from the French Gymnasium in Berlin in 1900 . A year later he began studying chemistry at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin and the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg , where he also studied medicine from 1903 to 1908 . In Heidelberg he was in 1906 during the later Nobel laureate Albrecht Kossel with a thesis in the field of physiological chemistry Dr. phil. nat. PhD . On Kossel's recommendation, in 1909 he went to the Institute for Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacology at the Albertus University in Königsberg , headed by Max Jaffé , where he worked under the supervision of Alexander Ellinger and was promoted to Dr. med. received his doctorate. In 1913 he completed his habilitation in medicinal chemistry . He married in Königsberg in 1911. His wife, with whom he had a daughter, died three years later of tuberculosis of the kidneys.

At the beginning of the First World War , Otto Riesser volunteered for the German Army . After initially serving as a doctor in field hospitals, he was dismissed from the army in December 1915 due to a hearing impairment that had existed since his youth . He followed Ellinger, who in 1914 had become a professor of pharmacology at the newly founded Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main , and in the summer of 1916 also completed his habilitation in Frankfurt in the field of pharmacology . Since in the later course of the war volunteers were recruited who had been retired as unfit at the beginning of the war, he worked as a battalion doctor in the army from September 1917 until the end of the war. He received the Iron Cross, 2nd and 1st class. In the summer of 1918, while he was still in the army, he was appointed associate professor in Frankfurt, where he worked with Werner Lipschitz for a short time . A year later he moved to the Institute for Vegetative Physiology at Frankfurt University, headed by Gustav Embden , where he was subsequently given the license to teach physiology . In 1919 he married for the second time. In addition to two children from a previous marriage to his second wife, he fathered two children in his second marriage.

In 1921 Otto Riesser was appointed to succeed Hugo Schulz as Professor of Pharmacology and Institute Director at the University of Greifswald. Four years later, he decided to move back to Frankfurt, where he had been appointed to succeed Ellinger, in favor of his pupil Werner Lipschitz due to disagreements between the medical faculty in Frankfurt and the Prussian Ministry of Education. In 1928, however, he followed his appointment to the University of Breslau, where he took over the chair of pharmacology and head of the pharmacological institute from Julius Pohl . His successor in Greifswald was Paul Wels . After the takeover of power by the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) and the passing of the law to restore the civil service , Riesser was the only professor of Jewish descent at the medical faculty in Wroclaw who was aware of the layoffs, alongside the dermatologist Max Jessner As a result of the law, university lecturers were initially not affected. In the summer of 1934, however, he was deposed as professor and institute director. A transfer to the Georg-Speyer-Haus in Frankfurt did not take place because of the Nuremberg Laws . Rather, they led to his final dismissal from the service of the University of Breslau in December 1935.

Riesser then went to Switzerland, where at the beginning of 1936 he took over the management of the physiological-chemical department at the Swiss Research Institute for High Mountain Climate and Medicine in Davos . His family followed him in the summer of that year. Since he was unable to get a passport as a result of Heinrich Himmler's decree , he had to return to Frankfurt at the end of 1937. After the November pogroms of 1938 , as a result of which he was briefly imprisoned, he emigrated to the Netherlands in April 1939 , where he got a job at the Pharmacotherapeutic Institute of the University of Amsterdam, headed by Ernst Laqueur , and later worked alone in a small laboratory in his home town of Naarden . In August 1945 he returned to Frankfurt to his family, who had remained in Germany because his wife, unlike Riesser, was not of Jewish descent. In the Greater Hessian State Ministry from December 1945 to June 1946, he was responsible for rebuilding the universities as a special advisor for culture and teaching. He then received a teaching position for border areas of pharmacology and physiology at the Frankfurt University, where he took over the management of the pharmacological institute in early 1949 as the successor to Fritz Külz . In December of the same year he died a while surgical removal ulcer of the duodenum in 67 years.

Act

Otto Riesser published over 160 publications . His research focused on the formation of creatine in the body and the physiology of the muscles . In the early 1920s he was the first to find out that acetylcholine causes the skeletal muscles to contract and that this is accompanied by a depolarization of the cell membrane . He suspected that the point of attack was what the British physiologist John Newport Langley called receptive substance at the time and is now known as the nicotine receptor of the motor endplate . This research by Otto Riesser was close to that of Otto Loewi . When Henry Hallett Dale later reported on acetylcholine as a neurotransmitter in skeletal muscle, he always referred to Riesser as well. From 1911 to 1932 Otto Riesser was active in the scientific committee of the German Sports Medical Association. In 1932 he was elected to the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina . However, his membership was canceled in 1938 due to his Jewish ancestry. In October 1947 he was elected chairman of the German Pharmacological Society. In the last year of his life he was co-editor of the pharmacological journal Naunyn-Schmiedebergs Archiv .

Otto Riesser was a member of the Allemannia Heidelberg fraternity from the beginning of his studies in 1900 and later also of the Königsberg fraternity of Gothia . In Greifswald he temporarily held the chairmanship of the Association of Old Fraternity Members. He held his inaugural lecture in Frankfurt in 1916 on "Physical exercise in the light of physiological and pharmacological research" and promoted student sports at the universities where he worked . From 1913 to 1932 he gave a lecture on "Biological Basics of Physical Education". When a new military sports movement gained a large following around 1930, he got involved to bring together students from all political backgrounds. In the anti-Semitism dispute from 1931 within the German fraternity , he passionately defended the Jewish association members. However, he could not prevail. In 1934 he was advised to leave the country voluntarily, which he complied with. For estate of Otto Sandriesser included a seven-sided resume and a 36-page "sketch of memories of my scientific career," the 1998 by the Mainzer pharmacologists Erich Muscholl was published. What is remarkable about these autobiographical memories are the time and place of writing, in 1944 in Naarden during the time of his emigration to the Netherlands. Otto Riesser's self-testimony shows that he saw himself as a national liberal and committed himself to his Germanness, the fraternity principles and the idea of ​​the Olympic Games throughout his life .

See also : “Forbearance” in the article University under National Socialism

Works

• Manual of normal and pathological physiology. Volume 8. Berlin 1925 (as co-author)
• Body and work. Manual of occupational physiology. Berlin 1927 (as co-author)
• Pharmacy and Medicinal Prescription: A Textbook. Berlin and Vienna 1935
• Muscle pharmacology and its application in the therapy of muscle diseases. Berlin 1949

literature

• Anna Bębenek-Gerlich: Bioergography of the pharmacologist Otto Riesser (1882-1949). Dissertation at the Medical Faculty of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Münster 2009 ( digitized version ).
• Gert Taubmann: Otto Riesser † . In: Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's archive for experimental pathology and pharmacology . tape 209 , no. 2-3 , 1950, pp. I – VIII , doi : 10.1007 / BF00244604 (obituary).
• Riesser, Otto. In: Konrad Löffelholz, Ullrich Trendelenburg : Persecuted German-speaking pharmacologists 1933–1945. Dr. Schrör Verlag, Frechen 2008, ISBN 3-9806004-8-3 , pp. 103-105

Web links

• Literature by and about Otto Riesser in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature about Otto Riesser in the state bibliography MV

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Philosophical dissertation: On the knowledge of the optical isomers of arginine and ornithine . OCLC 47905955 .
2. ↑ Medical dissertation: On the chemistry of uro-rose . OCLC 908819593 .
3. ^ Ernst Elsheimer (ed.): Directory of the old fraternity members according to the status of the winter semester 1927/28. Verlag der Burschenschaftliche Blätter, Frankfurt am Main 1928, p. 419
4. ↑ Burschenschaftliche Blätter , vol. 45, year 1930/1931, p. 256
5. ↑ Otto Riesser: Sketch for memories of my scientific career, written in 1944 in Naarden (Holland). Edited and appended by Erich Muscholl, Mainz. In: DGPT Forum 1998; Issue 23, 46-60