Juda Hirsch Quastel

Judah Hirsch " Harry " Quastel ( born October 2, 1899 in Sheffield, UK, † October 15, 1987 in Vancouver, Canada ) was a British- Canadian biochemist and neuroscientist. Quastel is considered one of the founders of Neurochemistry.

Life

Quastel was the eldest of five children of the Orthodox Jewish emigrants Jonas and Flora (born Itcovitz ) Quastel from Tarnopol, Eastern Galicia, now Ukraine. His father ran a sweet shop in Sheffield.

From 1917 to 1919 Quastel for the British Army worked as a laboratory assistant for microbiology and pathology at St Georges Hospital. Quastel studied at Imperial College London Chemistry, 1921, he earned a bachelor and 1926 a Doctor of Science. In 1924 he had acquired at the University of Cambridge in the later Nobel Prize winner Frederick Gowland Hopkins with a PhD work on the metabolism of bacteria. Quastel remained connected to the University of Cambridge as a Fellow of Trinity College.

From 1930 to 1941 Quastel was head of research at Cardiff City Mental Hospital. From 1941 worked Quastel for Agricultural Research Council (ARC, Rothamsted Research).

Quastel 1947 went to Canada. In Montreal, he became professor of biochemistry at McGill University and Director of the Montreal General Hospital Research Institute. In 1966 he became Professor of Neurochemistry at the Psychiatry of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In 1983 he became Professor Emeritus.

Quastels first wife Henrietta (born young man), whom he had met in 1931 during a visit to Basel in Mark Guggenheim, died in 1973 from cancer. With her he had a daughter and two sons: Michael R. Quastel is a professor of physiology at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, David MJ Quastel is Emeritus Professor of Pharmacology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His second wife Judah Quastel was married to Susan Ricardo since 1975. Quastel was considered a staunch Zionist. From 1950 he served as Governor (Member of the Supervisory Board) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Work

1927/1928 presented Quastel the thesis of the active site of an enzyme on. He discovered the competitive inhibition of enzymes by analogues of the respective substrate. Quastel led suspensions of Escherichia coli as an object of biochemical studies on living cells. He could identify biochemical causes of mental disorders for the first time. Quastel coined the term " phenylketonuria ". In 1936 he showed that acetylcholine is also synthesized in the brain. Quastel could show that energy-consuming transport processes of the cell, sodium is necessarily involved ( now known as the sodium-potassium pump).

Quastel and co-workers discovered in 1937 that the brain has a system to oxidize biogenic amines by each of the amino group is removed ( deamination ).

Designed with the HG Thornton and P. Nutman Quastel selective herbicides as derivatives of indole - 3-acetic acid, including 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, which was later used in the Vietnam War as a defoliant. Other agricultural scientific papers dealt with artificial soil conditioners.

Later work of his group dealt with membrane transport, amino acid metabolism, interactions of carbohydrates and amino acids in the brain, tumor metabolism, phagocytosis, absorption of sugars or the metabolism of glutamic acid.

Quastel published more than 370 scientific publications. He led more than 70 candidates to the PhD.

Writings (selection )

Awards (selection)

At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem there is an annual Juda Quastel guest lecture. At McGill University, there is a Judah Quastel Visiting Professorship.