Wilhelm Kühne

Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne, Willy Kühne, ( born March 28, 1837 in Hamburg, † June 10, 1900 in Heidelberg ) was a German physiologist.

Life

Bold, son of a wealthy businessman put 1854 on Lüneburg Johanneum the Abitur. He started in the same year to study at the University of Göttingen, where he studied chemistry with Friedrich Wöhler, physiology and anatomy with Rudolf Wagner Jakob Henle. In 1856 he received his doctorate with a dissertation on Wagner artificial diabetes in frogs. He subsequently did research at the University of Jena in Karl Gotthelf Lehmann for sugar metabolism. 1858 joined Kuehne only to Berlin, where he pursued as you muscles Bois- Reymond studies with Emil, and then to Paris to Claude Bernard. 1860 was followed by a stay in Vienna with Ernst Brücke and Carl Ludwig. From 1861 onwards, led Wilhelm Kühne the Chemical Laboratory in the Institute of Pathology of Rudolf Virchow, where he grappled with cell physiology. From 1868 to 1871 he was Professor of Physiology, University of Amsterdam, 1871, he went to the University of Heidelberg, where he ' until his death served as successor Hermann von Helmholtz, the Physiological Institute.

Kuehne was married to Helene Blum.

Work

A major focus of interest Daredevil was the physiology of digestion. He discovered the digestive enzyme trypsin, which he named. He observed the presence of an inactive precursor ( zymogen ) of the enzyme, it is characterized with respect to its Aktität in an alkaline medium and described separation methods. The term " enzyme " was coined by him and displaced the hitherto popular term " ferment ".

In his work from 1877 to seeing Kühne took up the work of the physiologist Franz Boll, who had described in 1876 that later became known as rhodopsin visual pigment fade under the influence of light and in the dark brisk alternating its color. Kuehne confirmed these observations, but the pigment is designated on the basis of the violet color observed by him as a " visual purple ". He disagreed Boll also to the effect that the color loss and regeneration only in a living organism are possible and demonstrated this on an isolated retina ( retina). Furthermore, he brought the rhodopsin in solution and postulated a protein content. The photochemical reaction was found to be dependent on the wavelength of light and light intensity. From its diverse investigations for seeing in animal experiments, the so-called optograms emerged, images of previously fixed objects on the retina of a dead animal. Contemporary considerations to use this optograms for forensic purposes, met Kuehne distances.

As a young researcher, Kuehne had turned to muscle physiology, which he researched his life. At frog muscles it places on research for muscle contraction and spread of excitation in nerve. He postulated the existence of an end plate between muscle and nerve, which could be confirmed by Julius Friedrich Cohnheim.

The physiologist Ida Henrietta Hyde in 1896 received his doctorate under Kuehne and against the initial resistance at the University of Heidelberg. Later, he turned into the conveyor her career.

In 1892 he was elected a member of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala and 1896 as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Writings (selection )

• Textbook of physiological chemistry. Engelmann, Leipzig 1858. ( Digitized output of 1866 on the Internet Archive )
• Myologische investigations. Veit, Leipzig 1860. ( Digitized in the Bavarian State Library )
• Over the peripheral end-organs of the motor nerves. Engelmann, Leipzig 1862. ( Digitized in the Internet Archive )
• Studies on the protoplasm and contractility. Engelmann, Leipzig 1864. ( Digitized in the Internet Archive )