Stephen Bach

This article is about the biochemist Stephen Bach. For the film producer and author of a similar name, see Steven Bach .

Stefan Joseph Bach (later Stephen Bach) (born December 11, 1897 in Nuremberg ; † 1973) was a German-British biochemist.

Life and activity

Bach was a son of the industrialist and Turkish consul general Siegfried B. Bach and his wife Anna, born Rose wall.

After attending a secondary school in Nuremberg, Bach studied at the Technical University in Munich, the TH Darmstadt and the TH Berlin. He obtained a degree in engineering and received his doctorate in 1923 in Berlin as a Dr.-Ing.

From 1924 to 1931 Bach worked as an assistant at the Technical-Chemical Institute at the Technical University of Berlin . He then worked from 1931 to 1933 as an assistant at the Physics Institute at the University of Erlangen .

After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Bach emigrated to Great Britain. There he found a job in 1935 at the William Dunn Institute of Biochemistry at Cambridge University , where he was to remain until 1951. During this time he obtained a British PhD degree in 1937 . In 1968 a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Bristol was added.

At the end of the 1930s, Bach was targeted by the police in Nazi Germany, who classified him as an important target: in the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or considered important, which is why, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht , they should be located and arrested by the occupying troops following special SS units with special priority.

Since he was still formally a German citizen, Bach was interned in 1940 for a few months as an "enemy alien" on the Isle of Man due to the state of war between Great Britain and the German Reich . After the war he was naturalized in Great Britain in 1946.

From 1951 to 1963 Bach taught as a lecturer in chemical physiology (Reader in Chemical Physiology) in the Department of Chemical Physiology at the University of Bristol. He then worked as a researcher at the School of Veterinary Science at Bristol University.

His main research interests were enzymology and cancer research . He has published articles in numerous biochemical journals.

Bach has received numerous awards for his work: He was a fellow at the Royal Institute of Chemistry in London, a member of the Biochemical Society and the Cambridge Philosophical Society. In 1964 he received an honorary professorship for physiological chemistry at the Medical Faculty of the University of Göttingen .

Marriage and offspring

Bach had been married to Erika Engelmann since 1924, with whom he had a daughter, Irene.

Publications

• The Metabolism of Protein Constituents in the Mammalian Body , University Press, New York 1952.
• 'On the mechanism of urea formation', Biochemical Journal 1939.
• 'Purification and crystallization of arginase', Biochim biophys Acta 1958.
• 'The effect of arginase on the retardation of tumor growth', British Journal of Cancer 1965.

literature

• Ray M. Cooper: Retrospective Sympathetic Affection. A Tribute to the Academic Community , 1996, p. 104.
• Who's Who of British Scientists , 1971, p. 34.
• Who is who , Vol. 17, 1970, p. 32.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Bach on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .
2. ^ Stefan Bach in the database Britain, Enemy Aliens and Internees