Wilhelm Hasselbach

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Wilhelm Hasselbach (born October 15, 1921 in Falkenstein ; † November 7, 2015 in Heidelberg ) was a German biochemist .

Life

After studying chemistry and physics at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main , he did military service and studied medicine . In November 1945 he resumed studying medicine at the Philipps University in Marburg and received his doctorate in 1949 with a thesis on the mechanism of action of acetylcholine after experiments on frogs' lungs. From 1949 to 1954 he worked at the Physiological Institute of the University of Tübingen in Hans Hermann Weber's group on the processes that lead to muscle contraction . In 1954 the company moved to Heidelberg to the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research . In 1957 he received his habilitation from the medical faculty of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg with work on the interaction of various nucleoside triphosphates with actomyosin in the gel state , which appointed him an adjunct professor in 1961 and an honorary professor in 1968. Hasselbach also became a scientific member of the Max Planck Society in 1961. From 1966 to 1989 he was director at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, where he was managing director several times.

Act

He discovered the calcium pump , which enables a tense muscle to relax again, in 1961. Whenever a muscle is tensed, the inside of its fibers is flooded with calcium ions, which are released from the sarcoplasmic reticulum and activate the contractile protein structures. Muscle relaxation only begins when the ATP-driven calcium pump pumps the calcium ions back into tiny intracellular storage vesicles in the sarcoplasmic reticulum and thus makes them ineffective. The role of the calcium pump is not only important for the understanding of the muscle and heart function, but also of general importance, because calcium ions are a universal intracellular regulator of biological processes. Calcium transport takes place in almost all cells, not least in the nerve cells of the brain.

For this discovery he was awarded the Feldberg Prize in 1963 . His other work explored the functioning of the calcium pump, for example the production of the cellular energy carrier adenosine triphosphate (ATP) by reversing the splitting of ATP, as well as the chemical and physiological conditions for its process.

Honors and memberships

Publications

  • Muscle (human physiology) . Urban and Schwarzenberg; 2nd edition (1975). ISBN 978-3-541-04902-8
  • HASSELBACH, W. and MAKINOSE, M. 1961. The calcium pump of the "relaxation grana" of the muscle and its dependence on the splitting of ATP. Biochem. Z. vol. 333, p. 518-528
  • HASSELBACH, W. and MAKINOSE, M. 1963. About the mechanism of calcium transport through the membranes of the sarcoplasmic reticulum. Biochem. Z. vol. 339, p. 94-111
  • HASSELBACH, W. and ELFVIN, LG 1967. Structural and chemical asymmetry of the calcium-transporting membranes of the sarcotubular system as revealed by electron microscopy. Journal of Ultrastructure Research. vol. 17, p. 598-622
  • MAKINOSE, M. and HASSELBACH, W. 1971. ATP synthesis by the reverse of the sarcoplasmic calcium pump. FEBS letters. vol. 12, p. -
  • HASSELBACH, W. 1989. From frog lung to calcium pump. Membrane Transport: People and Ideas. At the. Physiol. Soc. p. - 187-201
  • HASSELBACH, W. and MIGALA, A .: How many ryanodine binding sites are involved in caffeine induced calcium release from sarcoplasmic reticulum terminal cisternae vesicles ?. In: Journal of Nature Research C . 47, 1992, pp. 136-147 ( PDF , free full text).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Member entry by Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Hasselbach at the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , accessed on January 11, 2017.
  2. ^ Paul Morawitz Prize , website of the German Society for Cardiology , accessed on July 25, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Hasselbach, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German biochemist
DATE OF BIRTH October 15, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Falkenstein
DATE OF DEATH November 7, 2015
Place of death Heidelberg