Berta Scharrer

Berta Scharrer ( born December 1, 1906 as Berta Vogel in Munich, † July 23, 1995 in New York) was involved in the development of new scientific discipline Neuroendocrinology. After her occurring in Australasia cockroach Escala Scharrerae was named in recognition of her research on invertebrates.

Life

Berta Vogel was born as a daughter of Johanna white bird and the Vice-President of the Bavarian Supreme Court, BayObLG Karl Phillip Vogel. She received her PhD in 1930 at the Ludwig- Maximilians- University of Munich with a thesis on the nutritional quality of various sugar for the honey bee. At the University she worked with Prof. Karl von Frisch. Already at that time she moved out of their laboratory studies on minnows the conclusion that nerve cells can secrete certain substances similar to hormones endocrine gland cells. This contradicted the former doctrine, nerve functions were an exclusively electrical phenomenon.

In 1934 she married Ernst Scharrer ( 1905-1965 ), with whom she had previously worked for two years together at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry in Munich. After that she worked without pay on Edinger - Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt am Main. Together they continued the research on neuroendocrine functions, Berta Scharrer on invertebrates and her husband on vertebrate animals. 1935 Berta Scharrer described neurosecretory cells in the snail Aplysia and the worm Nereis. Her work has been largely rejected by other scientific enterprise.

Forced by the onset of Nazi terror, the beginning of the Holocaust, she emigrated in 1937 with her husband in the United States. For this, they used a Rockefeller Research Fellowship, which was awarded Ernst Scharrer from the University of Chicago. Despite their difficult financial situation, Berta Scharrer continued her research in a lab in Chicago continued. They used mainly the South American giant cockroach Leucophaea maderae as an experimental animal, as in the still following four decades of its scientific work. In 1938, she was able to demonstrate neurosecretory cells in arthropods. Two years later, she presented her findings for the first time in front of American science in New York. From 1940 to 1946 she taught at the histological Institute Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, then at the University of Colorado Denver, but again both in unpaid position.

She received in September 1955, despite the discrimination against female scientists, a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, a College of Yeshiva University in the Bronx. Her husband died in 1965 in a swimming accident.

In 1976 she took over the leadership of the Faculty Albert Einstein College of Medicine and remained until her retirement working there, for the first time with a reasonable payment. The concept of Neuroendocrinology and secretion, which Berta Scharrer and her husband had developed, was recognized as a distinct scientific discipline. Berta Scharrer increasingly received recognition and awards for their achievements, such as Harvard University for "as well as a nomination for a Nobel Prize for her pioneering research in brain chemicals. " In the late 1970s, it published a comprehensive theory of the evolutionary origin of neurosecretory cells and studied the properties of neuropeptides. In the decade after, she conducted research in the new field of comparative neuroimmunology.

Only five months after she had retired, Berta Scharrer died in New York.

Awards (selection)

  • Fellow of the Case Western Reserve University ( 1940-46 )
  • Guggenheim Fellow (1947 /48)
  • U.S. Public Health Service Fellow ( 1948-50 )
  • Grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF ) ( 1978-80 );
  • Golden Kraepelin Medal ( 1978)
  • S. C. Koch Award ( 1980)
  • Henry Gray Award from the American Association of Anatomists (1982 )
  • Schleiden Medal of the Leopoldina (1983 )
  • National Medal of Science from the NSF (1983 )
  • Bavarian Order of Merit (1994 )
  • Member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Society Of Zoologists, the American Association of Anatomists ( President 1978/79 ), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, among others
  • Dr. h c. ( Giessen 1976, Smith Collage 1980, Calgary in 1982, Yeshiva University in 1983, Mount Holyoke College in 1984, State University of New York at Old Westbury, 1985)
  • Award of the Ernst- and - Berta Scharrer - price by the German Society of Endocrinology and Lilly Germany GmbH (since 1999)

Publications

  • Neuropeptides and immunoregulation (1994 ) New York City, ISBN 0-387-57188-4
  • Functional morphology of neuroendocrine systems: evolutionary and environmental aspects (1995 ) New York City, ISBN 0-387-18155-5
  • Handbook of microscopic anatomy of man, Vol 6, blood vessel and Lymphgefässapparat: endocrine glands T. 5, The adrenal gland. Neurosecretion (1954 )
  • The structure of the ring -gland ( corpus allatum ) in normal and lethal larvae of Drosophila melanogaster (1938 ) Washington, DC
Neue Deutsche Biographie Integrated Authority File
119811
de