Walter Abraham Jacobs

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Walter Abraham Jacobs (born December 24, 1883 in New York City , † July 12, 1967 in Los Angeles ) was an American chemist .

Jacobs grew up in Brooklyn as the son of a tailor and studied at Columbia University with a bachelor's and master's degree and then at the University of Berlin , where he received his doctorate in 1907 under Emil Fischer . He was then a Fellow in Chemistry at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, where he stayed until his retirement.

One of his first investigations as Phoebus Levene's assistant was on nucleic acids. Both identified the sugar units in 1909 as D - ribose , determined several purine bases in the RNA and called the base sugar units in nucleic acids nucleosides (after Levene had previously called the base sugar phosphate units nucleotide ). From 1912 he headed the chemotherapy department (the director of the Rockefeller Institute, Simon Flexner , was impressed by Paul Ehrlich's discovery of Salvarsan and wanted a corresponding new research focus). In 1919 he and his assistant Michael Heidelberger found the drug against sleeping sickness tryparsamide . For this they were honored by the Belgian government (with the biologists Wade H. Brown and Louise Pierce). From 1922 he turned to pharmaceutically active substances from plants, in particular cardiac glycosides from the African creepers of the genus Strophanthus and the foxglove (digitalis) (structure determination and proof that the non-sugar residues ( aglycones ) are steroids ). After that, he turned to alkaloids .

He co-discovered the Gould-Jacobs reaction and was the first to propose the correct structural formula for lysergic acid , which he had previously isolated from ergot with Lyman Craig in 1934 (his laboratory worked on determining the structure for eleven years). He also determined the structure of various alkaloids from Germer (Veratrum) and Eisenhut (Aconitum).

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1932 .

literature

  • Robert Elderfield : Walter A. Jacobs . In: Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Science . 51, 1980.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data, publications and academic family tree of Walter A. Jacobs at academictree.org, accessed on February 13, 2018.
  2. ↑ Craig, LC; Shedlovsky, T .; Gould, RG; Jacobs, WA: J. Biol. Chem. , Vol. 125, p. 289 (1938).
  3. ↑ M. Volkan Kisakürek, Edgar Heilbronner: Highlights of chemistry . Wiley-VCH-Verlag, Weinheim 1994, p. 164. Article .
personal data
SURNAME Jacobs, Walter Abraham
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jacobs, Walter A.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American chemist
DATE OF BIRTH December 24, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH July 12, 1967
Place of death los Angeles