Emile Zuckerkandl

Emile Zuckerkandl ( born July 4, 1922 in Vienna, † November 9, 2013 in Palo Alto, California ) was an evolutionary biologist Austrian origin, who worked in France and the United States.

Life

His mother was a daughter of Malva psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel. His grandmother Berta Zuckerkandl - Szeps, daughter of the liberal newspaper publisher Moritz Szeps, led in Vienna until 1938 as their mother a prominent artistic and literary salon. His grandfather Emil Zuckerkandl was an Austrian anatomist.

Zuckerkandl in 1938 fled from persecution by the Nazis with his mother and his grandmother died in 1945 in Paris Berta to Paris and Algiers. After he had received about Albert Einstein and Walther Mayer a scholarship, he went in the fall of 1946 in the United States. In 1947 he met his future wife, Jane know and gained a degree in physiology at the University of Illinois.

He then returned to Paris and earned a doctorate in biology at the Sorbonne. With his wife, whom he had married in Paris in 1950, he lived first in Brittany, until he was brought from Linus Pauling to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (California ) in 1959.

Emile Zuckerkandl can be regarded as one of the founders of the research field of molecular evolution. Thus, he postulated, for example, under the direction of and in collaboration with Linus Pauling in 1962 the hypothesis of a molecular clock, after which proteins change at a constant rate of mutation. In 1965 he was appointed to the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Montpellier, where he founded a research center for molecular biology and launched. In 1977 he returned to California and was president of the Linus Pauling Institute, and from 1992 President of the successor institution to the Institute for Molecular Medicine.

2012 bought the Austrian National Library of Zuckerkandl his personal archive with the autographs of famous people, like they went with his grandmother in Vienna and one, with many letters to Berta Zuckerkandl and with its report on the flight from France to Algiers with Emile. 2013, Theresa Klug Berger and Ruth Pleyer this report under the title Escape! From Bourges to Algiers in the summer of 1940. Czernin Verlag published in Vienna.