Sune Bergström

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Sune Bergström

Sune Karl Bergström (born January 10, 1916 in Stockholm , † August 15, 2004 ibid) was a Swedish physician and biochemist .

In 1972 he received a Gairdner Foundation International Award and in 1975 the Amory Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Together with Bengt Ingemar Samuelsson and Sir John Robert Vane, he received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1977 and the 1982 Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology . They were officially honored for their groundbreaking work on prostaglandins and closely related biologically active substances.

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Bergström was born in Stockholm in 1916. He studied medicine and chemistry at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and began his research career in 1934 in Erik Jorpes' laboratory on heparins . There he received his doctorate in 1943 on the biochemical properties of lipids ( fats ) and steroids .

From 1947 to 1958 he was professor of biochemistry at Lund University . In 1957 he was appointed to the chair for biochemistry at the Karolinska Institutet , which he followed in 1958. Bergström researched prostaglandins and their chemical properties in both Lund and Stockholm. In 1957 he succeeded in producing one of these substances in pure form for the first time .

In 1966 Bergström was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1973 to the National Academy of Sciences . In 1975 he was appointed chairman of the board of directors of the Nobel Foundation . From 1977 to 1982 he was also Chairman of the Advisory Committee on Medical Research at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva . In 1977 he became a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina . In 1973 he received the Oscar Carlson Medal from the Swedish Chemical Society . The American Philosophical Society , of which he was a member since 1984, awarded him in 1988 with their Benjamin Franklin Medal .

family

Bergström married Maj Gernandt in 1943, with whom he had a son who was born in 1955. He also had a relationship with the Estonian chemist Karin Pääbo, with whom he worked for a time, and with whom he had a son, also born in 1955, the evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo , who worked in Leipzig . The first son only found out about his half-brother in 2004, shortly before Bergström's death.

Importance of Research

Bergström, like his two colleagues Bengt Ingemar Samuelsson and Sir John Robert Vane, researched prostaglandins . These substances were only discovered and named in the mid-1930s by Ulf Svante von Euler-Chelpin , who received the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his neurophysiological studies. The importance of these substances as biologically active substances, however, only became known through the work of Bergström, Samuelsson and Vane. Bergström set the starting point for researching prostaglandins by isolating individual prostaglandins and investigating their chemical structure. He was also able to prove that the prostaglandins are formed from unsaturated fatty acids .

On this basis, research on prostaglandins could be continued. Today it is known that these substances occur in almost all animal species and various plants and that they have a very diverse spectrum of functions. In humans and other vertebrates, for example, they play an important role in reproduction , in the development and regulation of inflammation , in the regulation of blood pressure and in the transmission of nerve impulses . Bergström's work focused primarily on the effects of various prostaglandins on the coronary arteries , where their arterial-dilating properties apparently represent a physiological adaptation of the circulatory system to physical exertion.

Some prostaglandins are antispasmodic, others cause contractions of the smooth muscle . Prostaglandins, which get into the uterus with the sperm during sexual intercourse, produce the contraction of this organ during female orgasm .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Winfried R. Pötsch, Annelore Fischer and Wolfgang Müller with the collaboration of Heinz Cassebaum : Lexicon of important chemists . Bibliographisches Institut Leipzig, 1988, p. 40, ISBN 3-323-00185-0 .
  2. ^ Member entry by Sune Bergström at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on October 12, 2012.
  3. ↑ Lista mottagare. Svenska Kemisamfundet, accessed on September 7, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Pearce Wright: Obituary: Sune Bergstrom The Guardian , August 18, 2004, Link (EN)
  5. ↑ Elizabeth Kolbert: Sleeping with the Enemy - What happened between the Neanderthals and us? The New Yorker , August 15, 2011, Link (EN)
personal data
SURNAME Bergström, Sune
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bergström, Sune Karl (full name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION Swedish biochemist and Nobel Prize winner
DATE OF BIRTH January 10, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Stockholm
DATE OF DEATH August 15, 2004
Place of death Stockholm