Walter Julius Viktor Schoeller

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Walter Julius Viktor Schoeller (born November 17, 1880 in Berlin , † July 25, 1965 in Konstanz ) was a German chemist and laboratory manager in Berlin.

Live and act

Walter Schoeller, the son of the Berlin judiciary August Viktor Schoeller (1850–1923) and Martha Stahlschmid (1857–1882) as well as the grandson of Julius Viktor Schoeller (1811–1883), the gynecologist and director of the Berlin midwifery training institute, studied after graduating from high school In 1899 at the Royal Wilhelm Gymnasium at the universities in Bonn and Berlin, the subject chemistry. In 1900 he became a member of the Corps Palatia in Bonn . Under the Nobel Prize winner Emil Fischer , Schoeller received his doctorate in 1906 with the topic: “ On the splitting of phenylalanine into its optically active components". Then he researched together with the Berlin chemist Walther Schrauth on organic mercury compounds for the production of antisyphilitic agents. This research was not yet crowned with success, only individual defined substances were used in diuretics and wood preservatives . Shortly before the First World War , in which Schoeller took part as a cavalry and gas officer, he got a license to teach chemistry.

After the war years, he initially held a position as associate professor for chemistry at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau from 1919 to 1923 , but then returned to Berlin, where he took over the management of the scientific laboratories at Schering-Kahlbaum AG . Here Schoeller set up, among other things, several working groups to research and develop new diagnostic methods based on organic X-ray contrast media as well as new pharmaceuticals, especially sulfonamides and organic gold compounds.

In 1932 he and K. Junkmann reported on their first isolation of thyrotropin .

Although Schoeller had joined the NSDAP , he skillfully used his family and professional relationships with important decision-makers of the Nazi regime to protect important Berlin research institutions from political influence. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Biochemistry under Adolf Butenandt and, above all, the KWI for Biology under Otto Warburg benefited from this . Warburg himself owes it to Schoeller's influence that he was reinstated and restituted in 1942, one year after his dismissal as head of the institute. On the other hand, Schoeller's attempt, together with Otto Hahn, to obtain the release of their mutual friend Wilhelm Traube , who was arrested in 1942 due to his Jewish descent and who died in prison from the consequences of abuse before the planned deportation, failed .

tomb

After the Second World War , Schoeller moved south again, where he headed the private research institute for medicine and chemistry in Heiligenberg on Lake Constance from 1946 to 1956 . He spent the last years of his life here and died on July 25, 1965 in Konstanz. He is buried in Berlin in the Old Twelve Apostles Cemetery .

During his time in Berlin, Schoeller benefited professionally and personally from an intensive collaboration with the later Nobel Prize winner Adolf Butenandt. He made use of the technical possibilities in Schoeller's laboratories to process various starting products such as urine or placenta , from which he then isolated oestrogens , gestagens and androgens . Schoeller himself converted estrogen into estradiol through catalytic hydrogenation , thereby proving that this is the physiologically effective form of estrogen.

Other focal points of his work were the isolation of deoxycorticosterone, with which he characterized its effect as a glucocorticoid , as well as the isolation and characterization of glandotropic hormones of the anterior pituitary gland . These research results subsequently resulted in the development of a number of therapeutically effective drugs.

Honors

In the course of his professional years, Schoeller was honored several times for his services, including in 1932 when he was appointed Dr. med. hc from the University of Würzburg and in 1951 Dr. rer. nat. hc from the University of Braunschweig . In 1938 he was accepted as a member of the Leopoldina and in 1955 made an honorary member of the German Society for Endocrinology . Since 1960 he has been a corresponding member of the Braunschweig Scientific Society .

In 1955 Schoeller was awarded the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

In memory of its two well-deserved employees, Walter Julius Viktor Schoeller and Karl Junkmann, Schering AG donated the Schoeller Junkmann Prize of the German Society for Endocrinology from 1966, currently 10,000 euros, for endocrinologists under 40 years of age working in Europe Research in the field of endocrinology.

family

Walter Julius Viktor Schoeller was married to Paula de Crignis (* 1887), a sister-in-law of Philipp Bouhler , the Reichsleiter of the Fuhrer's office . With her he had the son and also a chemist, Dr. rer. nat. Claus Dieterich Schoeller, and the daughter Marianne, who, as a trained journalist, married Werner Steltzer, the head of the information center of the Berlin Senate under Mayor Willy Brandt and brother of the Ambassador Hans-Georg Steltzer .

Works (selection)

  • Walter Schoeller / M. Gehrke: On the standardization of the male sex hormone , in: Vienna Archive for Internal Medicine 21, 1931, pp. 329–36
  • W. Schoeller: Recent work on the hormone area , in: Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 58, 1932, pp. 1531–34;
  • W. Schoeller / Max Dohrn / Walter Hohlweg: About inhibition factors and the mechanism of the effect of opposite sex-specific sex hormones on the development of the gonads , in: Biochemische Zeitschrift , 264, 1933, pp. 352-56
  • W. Schoeller / Hans Goebel // Erwin Schenk: New hydrogenation products of the follicle hormone , in: Naturwissenschaft 21, 1933, p. 286
  • W. Schoeller: Chemotherapeutic research in the field of sulfonamides , in: Chemiker-Zeitung , 67, 1943, pp. 21-24;

Literature and Sources

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1930, 14 , 585
  2. ↑ K. Junkmann, W. Schöller: About the thyreotrope hormone of the anterior pituitary lobe. In: Clinical weekly. Volume 11, 1932, p. 1176 f. ( doi: 10.1007 / BF01766365 ).
  3. ↑ Schoeller Junkmann Prize


personal data
SURNAME Schoeller, Walter Julius Viktor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German chemist and laboratory manager in Berlin
DATE OF BIRTH November 17, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH July 25, 1965
Place of death Constancy