Wilhelm Siegmund Feldberg

Wilhelm Feldberg (1990)

Wilhelm Siegmund Feldberg (born November 19, 1900 in Hamburg , † October 23, 1993 in London ) was a German pharmacologist and physiologist .

Life

From Germany to England

Feldberg came from a wealthy Jewish family. He studied medicine in Heidelberg and Munich. In 1925 he was promoted to Dr. med. PhD. He then visited the British physiologist John Newport Langley at Cambridge University . He stayed in England for a total of two years, including half a year with Henry Hallett Dale at the National Institute for Medical Research in Hampstead near London . Back in Berlin in 1927, he became an assistant to Wilhelm Trendelenburg at the Physiological Institute of the Friedrich Wilhelms University, later the Humboldt University . In 1933 he was dismissed overnight under the Law Restoring the Civil Service . A Rockefeller Fellowship enabled him to continue his work at Dale at the National Institute for Medical Research . From his memories:

“One day in 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, the director of the Berlin Institute where I worked informed me that I had been dismissed, had to leave the institute by midnight at the latest, and was not allowed to re-enter. ... The first few weeks in London were terrible, with the constant fear that my family would be prevented from leaving. When they finally came I drove to Harwich to pick them up. I was worried because it was said that it was not uncommon for travelers to be taken off the trains at the German-Dutch border and sent back. I paced the quay hours before the ship arrived. A customs officer must have been watching me because when he gave my wife the entry permit, he said: 'Ms. Feldberg, you must never leave your husband alone again.' That was the sympathy of many English people for the German refugees: we had become refugees. "

Australia and England again

After his Rockefeller Fellowship expired, Feldberg accepted a position at the Walter and Eliza Hall Medical Research Institute in Melbourne , Australia in 1935 . In 1938 he was able to return to England as a reader in Physiology in Cambridge. In 1949 he became head of the Physiology and Pharmacology Department at the National Institute for Medical Research , which was relocated from Hampstead to Mill Hill that year. Retired in 1965, he continued his research until 1990.

The Feldberg Foundation

After 1945 Feldberg was one of the first emigrants to make contact with Germans again. With his university lecturer's salary and pension entitlements, a total of £ 600,000, paid for by the State of Berlin , he founded the Feldberg Foundation , which has been awarding an annual prize to a German and an English scientist since 1961.

The animal experimentation controversy

Feldberg's old age was overshadowed by allegations about his animal experiments . Opponents of animal experiments had taken photos and tape recordings in his laboratory. The Medical Research Council found that animal experimentation rules had been violated and the Home Office withdrew his animal experiment permit.

research

Feldberg's research focused primarily on the body's own signaling molecules histamine and acetylcholine . Already in Berlin he demonstrated what had previously only been suspected, namely that histamine is released in the body during anaphylaxis . In Australia he found that snake and bee venom also release histamine and so-called slow reacting substances , among which bradykinin and leukotrienes were later identified. He found histamine, acetylcholine and serotonin in the poison of the nettle hair .

In 1921 Otto Loewi recognized acetylcholine as the neurotransmitter of the parasympathetic nervous system in the heart of frogs. In a joint work with Otto Krayer , while still in Berlin, Feldberg showed that acetylcholine is also a carrier substance of the parasympathetic nervous system in mammals . In England, then a series of investigations that the image of completed followed from 1933 is acetylcholine neurotransmitter in the ganglia of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, in the postganglionic-sympathetic fibers to the sweat glands in the neuromuscular junction , in electroplax the torpedo and Brain. He published the study on the neuromuscular endplate together with Dale and Marthe Vogt - she, too, an emigrant from Germany. The research appeared the same year that Dale and Loewi received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine . Overall, Feldberg helped the theory of the (as a rule) chemical nature of information transfer through synapses to gain general acceptance.

For his brain studies, Feldberg developed cannulas with which substances could be injected directly into the brain of anesthetized test animals. He has assigned the regulation of certain body functions to certain areas of the brain, such as the regulation of body temperature and the development of fever in the anterior hypothalamus .

Honors

The Free University of Berlin and the universities in Bradford, Freiburg im Breisgau, Heidelberg, Cologne, London, Liège and Würzburg awarded Feldberg honorary doctorates. He was an honorary member, for example, of the Royal Society , the British Pharmacological Society , the German Pharmacological Society and the Société FranÇaise d'Allergie . In 1961 he received the Great Federal Cross of Merit , in 1968 the Schmiedeberg plaque of the German Pharmacological Society , in 1983 the Royal Medal of the Royal Society and in 1989 the Wellcome Gold Medal of the British Pharmacological Society .

Individual evidence

1. ^ W. Feldberg: The early history of synaptic and neuromuscular transmission by acetylcholine: reminiscences of an eye witness . In. AL Hodgkin et al. (Ed): The Pursuit of Nature. Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 64-83
2. ↑ ^{a b} G.W. Bisset and TVP Bliss: Wilhelm Siegmund Feldberg, CBE In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 1993; 43: 146-170.
3. ^ Lothar Jaenicke : Wilhelm S (iegmund) Feldberg . In: BIOspektrum, March 2008.
4. ^ HH Dale, W. Feldberg and M. Vogt: Release of acetylcholine at voluntary motor nerve endings . In: The Journal of Physiology 1936; 86: 353-380