Richard Kuhn

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Richard Kuhn

Richard Johann Kuhn (born December 3, 1900 in Vienna ; † July 31, 1967 in Heidelberg ) was an Austrian chemist and Nobel Prize winner from 1938.

Life

Richard Kuhn was born on December 3, 1900 in Vienna , where he also attended elementary school and Döblinger grammar school. There he attended the same classes from 1910 to 1918 as the later Nobel Prize winner Wolfgang Pauli . In 1918 he began studying chemistry at the University of Vienna , but in 1919, like his school friend Pauli, he switched to the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . During this time Kuhn was also involved as a volunteer in the suppression of the Munich Soviet Republic . In Munich he received his doctorate in 1922 with a thesis on the specificity of enzymes under Richard Willstätter . In 1925 he completed his habilitation here with a “contribution to the configuration problem of strength”. His publications from Munich up to 1926 describe further results on the enzyme topic. He also published the last results again in 1928 with Willstätter, who had resigned from all offices after the summer semester of 1925.

In the winter semester of 1925/26 he received a private lecturer position for general and analytical chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where he became full professor for general and analytical chemistry in 1926.However, his publications from 1927 to 1930 dealt with purely organic topics such as stereochemistry and polyunsaturates Hydrocarbons. His school friend Pauli also became professor for theoretical physics at the ETH in 1928.

In 1929 Kuhn became a research assistant at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and in 1930 head of the chemistry department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, which was founded in 1929 . Associated with this was the license to teach at the Ruprecht Karls University there . This KWI research facility "for medical research", headed by Ludolf von Krehl , combined the departments of physics ( Karl-Wilhelm Hausser ), chemistry (Richard Kuhn) and physiology ( Otto Meyerhof ) with pathology (von Krehl).

After von Krehl's death in 1937 he became director of the entire KWImF in Heidelberg. In connection with this appointment he also accepted a professorship for biochemistry at the University of Heidelberg and in 1938 a visiting professor for physiological chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia .

Kuhn was primarily concerned with plant pigments and vitamins and found many results independently of and parallel to Paul Karrer (for example on the structure of vitamin A and vitamin B 2 ), who had received the Nobel Prize in 1937 for his research in this regard. Together with his colleagues Edgar Lederer and Alfred Winterstein, he used chromatographic methods to isolate these sensitive substances , which had been developed by Michael Tswett and already considerably improved by Richard Willstätter .

In 1938 he synthesized vitamin B 6 . Kuhn received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1938 “for his work on carotenoids and vitamins ”, which he was not able to accept until 1948 due to a decree from the National Socialist rulers.

Richard Kuhn in the Third Reich

During the time of National Socialism he was a member of the Nazi teachers' association , but not a member of the NSDAP . In 1933 Kuhn dismissed his Jewish employees, in 1936 he denounced his “non-Aryan” colleague Otto Fritz Meyerhof that he was employing three Jewish employees at the KWI who had not yet fallen victim to the Nazi wave of purges .

In 1938 he was appointed "Leader" of the German Chemical Society . During the Second World War in 1940 he became head of the organic chemistry division within the German Research Foundation . For the 75th anniversary of the German Chemical Society, he gave a speech on December 5, 1942, which ended with the following words:

"" ... We remember the men in whose hands the common fate lies. To the Duce , Tenno and our Führer a triple victory Heil! "."

From 1943 he was involved in nerve gas research and invented the poison gas soman ( acetylcholinesterase inhibitor ) together with Konrad Henkel and Günter Quadbeck . He was informed about the human experiments of the National Socialists and wrote on December 10, 1943 in a statement on an alleged tuberculosis cure: "There have already been attempts on humans in a lung hospital near Darmstadt". On January 27, 1944, he was one of the participants in the mycelium conference in the Ministry of Armaments , where attempts were made to feed concentration camp prisoners with this cellulose waste product. In the same year he became a scientific adviser to Karl Brandt , the general commissioner for sanitary and health care.

post war period

After the end of World War II, he initially taught in the United States . In 1953 he returned to Germany as an Austrian. Kuhn, who had been director at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research from 1937 to 1945, became director at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research again after the transition from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society to the Max Planck Society . He was an honorary member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and winner of numerous international prizes. In 1958 he was awarded the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize and the Pour le mérite for science and the arts .

Kuhn gave its name to the Richard Kuhn Medal , donated by BASF in 1968 , which was awarded about every two years by the Society of German Chemists , of which he was President 1964/65, for achievements in the field of biochemistry .

In 2005, the company's board of directors decided not to award this medal any more, as his behavior in poison gas research and towards his Jewish colleagues during the National Socialist era disqualified Kuhn as a role model.

Tomb of the Richard Kuhn family, a red-brown quartz rock in the shape of boulders, in the forest section B of the Heidelberg mountain cemetery

In 1973 the Richard-Kuhn-Weg in Vienna- Penzing (14th district) was named after him. In December 2018, the Culture Committee of the City of Vienna decided to rename the Richard-Kuhn-Weg to Stadt-des-Kind-Weg .

Others

Kuhn married Daisy Hartmann (1907–1976) in 1928, with whom he had two sons and four daughters. One of his sons was the mechanical engineer Peter Kuhn .

Awards and memberships (selection)

Works (selection)

  • Physical chemistry and kinetics. Thieme, Leipzig 1924.
  • The chemistry of the present and the biology of the future. Rascher, Zurich 1928.
  • Together with Friedrich Bär on quinophthalones in Liebigs Ann. Chem. 516, 155, 1935
  • Biology. Hermann, Paris 1938.
  • Biochemistry. Wiesbaden 1947.
  • Biochemistry. Dieterich & Chemie, Wiesbaden, Weinheim an der Bergstrasse 1947–53.
  • Receptor biochemistry and resistance factors. Springer, Berlin 1959.
  • About cumulenes, X cis-trans isomerism in dinitro-tetraphinyl cumulenes. Chemie, Weinheim an der Bergstrasse 1959.
  • Ludolf von Krehl and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research . Lehmann, Munich 1961.
  • The medicinal treasure of the present and the pharmaceutical chemistry of the future. Düsseldorf 1965.

literature

  • Brigitte Hoppe : Adolf Windaus, Heinrich Wieland, Richard Kuhn, Leopold Ruzicka, Alexander Todd and Adolf Butenandt. Kindler, Zurich, Munich 1978/79.
  • Heinz A. Staab :  Kuhn, Richard. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-428-00194-X , pp. 266-268 ( digitized version ).
  • Gerhard Oberkofler and Peter Goller: Richard Kuhn. Innsbruck 1992.
  • Angelika Ebbinghaus and Karl Heinz Roth : extermination research. Nobel laureate Richard Kuhn, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and the development of nerve agents during the Third Reich. In: 1999. Journal for Social History of the 20th and 21st Century. Volume 17, Issue 1, 2002, pp. 15-50.
  • Florian Schmaltz: Research on warfare agents under National Socialism. For cooperation between Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, the military and industry. Göttingen 2005.
  • Lothar Jaenicke : Richard Kuhn, December 3, 1900 (Vienna) - August 1, 1967 (Heidelberg). In: News from chemistry. Volume 54, Number 5, Frankfurt 2006.
  • Jonathan B. Tucker: War of nerves. Chemical warfare from World War I to al-Quaeda. Publisher Pantheon Books, New York 2006, ISBN 1-4000-3233-4 (English)
  • Dagmar Drüll: Heidelberger Gelehrtenlexikon 1803-1932 . (Ed.): The rector of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität-Heidelberg. Springer Berlin Heidelberg Tokyo. 2012. 324 pp. ISBN 978-3642707612

Web links

Commons : Richard Kuhn  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Street names in Vienna since 1860 as “Political Places of Remembrance” (PDF; 4.4 MB), p. 101f, final research project report, Vienna, July 2013
  2. ^ R. Kuhn biography (Nobel Prize 1938) . For the topic see a. R. Willstätter and R. Kuhn: About units of measurement of the enzymes . In: Chem. Reports . 56 , pp. 509-512 (1923). doi : 10.1002 / cber.19230560217
  3. ^ R. Kuhn biography (University of Heidelberg) . - R. Kuhn biography (ETH Zurich)
  4. ↑ R. Willstätter, R. Kuhn and E. Bamann: About asymmetric ester hydrolysis by enzymes. (Communication I) . In: Reports of the German Chemical Society . 61 , pp. 886-895 (1928). doi : 10.1002 / cber.19280610503
  5. ↑ ETH database entry for R. Kuhn
  6. ↑ ETH database entry for R. Kuhn
  7. ↑ History of KWImF in Heidelberg
  8. ↑ R. Kuhn et al.: On the knowledge of xanthophylls. In: Zeitschrift für Physiologische Chemie 197/1931, p. 141.
  9. ↑ R. Kuhn, Edgar Lederer: About the colorants of the lobster (Astacus gammarus L.) and their parent substance, the Astacin. In: Reports of the German Chemical Society 66/1933, pp. 488–495.
  10. ↑ a b c d e f Ernst Klee : The personal dictionary for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 351.
  11. ↑ R. Kuhn: Special meeting on December 5, 1942 on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the German Chemical Society in the lecture hall of the Hofmannhaus (Berlin) . In: Ber. German Chem. Ges. 75 , A147-A202 (1942). doi : 10.1002 / cber.19420751297 quote on page A200.
  12. ↑ Florian Schmaltz: Warfare agent research in National Socialism. For cooperation between Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, the military and industry. Göttingen 2005, p. 496.
  13. ↑ After 1945, the young Republic of Austria expelled all citizens of the former Greater German Reich who were burdened by the Nazis, along with their families.
  14. ^ Courier: Burdened names: Much remains to be done . Article dated December 11, 2018, accessed December 12, 2018.
  15. ↑ Member entry of Richard Kuhn (with picture and CV) at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on January 12, 2017.
  16. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 141.
personal data
SURNAME Kuhn, Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kuhn, Richard Johann (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austro-German chemist and Nobel Prize winner (1938)
DATE OF BIRTH 3rd December 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH July 31, 1967
Place of death Heidelberg