Otto Fritz Meyerhof
Otto Fritz Meyerhof ( born April 12, 1884 in Hannover, † October 6, 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ) was a German biochemist who, together with Archibald Vivian Hill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his research on the metabolism in muscle in 1922. In particular, the Stockholm Nobel Committee Meyerhof praised for his discovery of the relationship between oxygen consumption and lactic acid production in muscle.
Life
Otto Fritz Meyerhof grew up in a German - Jewish family; Father Fritz Meyerhof was a wealthy merchant; the mother Bettina, born in May, was a housewife. He spent most of his childhood and youth in Berlin, where in 1903 he made his high school and then took up studying medicine. During this time he joined the Friends of the later teaching in Göttingen philosopher Leonard Nelson, where he remained all his life on friendly terms (after Nelson's early death, he was with Franz Oppenheimer and Minna Specht to 1937 the re -founded by Nelson treatises of Fries'schen school, New episode out ); learned here Meyerhof 1907 also his equally philosophically highly interested classmates Arthur Kronfeld and a little later the mathematics student and painter Hedwig Schallberg know, who became his wife in 1914. With her he had a daughter and two sons, who later pediatrician or physicists in the U.S..
He continued his studies in Freiburg, Strasbourg and Heidelberg continued and completed his PhD here in December 1909 with Franz Nissl, director of the Psychiatric University Hospital, with an economy based on the work of the philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries epistemological work that bore the title: "Contributions to the psychological theory of mental disorder ". With the psychoanalysis he analyzed in one run by his friend Kronfeld workgroup when he allowed himself to care at the clinic by Ludolf Krehl also attended by Viktor von Weizsäcker worked, by Otto Warburg for biochemical study of muscle metabolism and work into it.
Meyerhof 1912 went to the University of Kiel, habilitated in 1913 and became Professor in 1918. The offer of a professorship in the United States, which he received after the Nobel Prize in 1923, he proposed in 1924 in favor of the appeal to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin, from where he initiated in 1929 to that of Ludolf von Krehl Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was appointed for Medical Research in Heidelberg, where he served as Director of the Physiology Department in 1930 and came to further pioneering discoveries. During this time, Gustav Embden, Otto Meyerhof and Jakub Parnas clarified the mechanism of glycolysis on ( Embden - Meyerhof pathway ). Meyerhof 1931 was elected as a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. In 1937 the resignation from the academy since 1947 and the resumption as a corresponding member.
As director of a state institution not directly Meyerhof 1933 was initially able to retain control of the Institute, regardless of his Jewish origin, Baden minister of education, however, eluded him in 1935 under National Socialist influence the teaching license. In the following years while holding back the Institute colleagues at Meyerhof, working conditions still deteriorated to an intolerable degree, so that Meyerhof in September 1938 initially fled to Switzerland and from there to Paris. In 1940 he fled from the invading German troops to Spain and Portugal to the United States. There Rockefeller Foundation paid him a research professorship in physiological chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He died at age 67 on his second heart attack after he had the first seven years earlier survived.
The University of Heidelberg has established in 2001 with the establishment of the Otto Meyerhof Center for outpatient medicine and clinical research in his memory an honorable monument.
His son George Geoffrey Meyerhof was a civil engineer.