Erwin Chargaff

Erwin Chargaff ( born August 11, 1905 in Chernivtsi, † June 20, 2002 in New York) was an Austrian-American chemist and writer. As a scientist Chargaff made ​​important contributions to deciphering the structure of DNA. After his retirement in 1974, he set out with stylistic ground, critical essays a name.

Life

Chargaff visited the High School Wasagasse in Vienna, where he studied from 1923 first briefly philology, but soon chemistry at the Technische Hochschule. In 1928 he completed his studies in this subject with a doctorate. His doctoral supervisor was Fritz Feigl.

With a scholarship, he went as a Fellow at Yale University and operation there research on the lipids of the tuberculosis bacterium. In 1930 he returned to Europe and continued this research as an assistant in chemistry at the Hygienic Institute of the Friedrich -Wilhelms- University of Berlin continued. There he produced until 1933 also his habilitation thesis.

Chargaff came from a Jewish family, so he left Germany in 1933 after the seizure of power by the Nazis and moved to Paris at the Pasteur Institute. In 1935 he emigrated to the USA and worked at New York's Columbia University, where he taught from 1938 as an assistant professor and from 1952 as a professor of biochemistry and researched.

After 1974 he became increasingly with literary works to the public. His estate is located in the German Literature Archive in Marbach and in Philadelphia.

The researcher

After Chargaff had found in his research in the second half of the 1940s, that the same amounts of adenine and thymine, and the same amounts of cytosine and guanine are present in the DNA of each studied organism, he formulated the rule that these bases always occur in pairs. Thus, Chargaff was the first scientist who explored the molecular appearance of the DNA. He discovered the bases adenine and guanine, and thymine and cytosine in DNA and introduced the so-called Chargaff'schen rules. He allowed James Watson and Francis Crick, the groundbreaking discovery that DNA is arranged as a spiral of double-helix structure. At the award ceremony of the Nobel Prize for it in 1962, Chargaff was not taken into account.

Chargaff himself Crick and Watson had not initially taken seriously, as they had no significant knowledge of the chemistry. In an interview with Crick Chargaff forgot important molecular structures and Watson made ​​the same conversation inappropriate comments that betrayed his ignorance in the field of chemistry. Chargaff called the young colleagues after "scientific Clowns".

The Chargaff'schen rules

The writer

As a writer Chargaff used the form of the essay. He tied it to Karl Kraus, whose lectures he had attended in his studies in Vienna. Chargaff sat in his essays critical of social, political and cultural phenomena apart, but especially with the current science, and especially with his own long-standing art, the genetic research.

Works ( in German )

All translations listed here are in the Klett- Cotta Verlag, Stuttgart, appeared.

  • The fire of Heraclitus. Sketches from a life before nature. 1979, ISBN 3-608-95134-2.
  • Incomprehensible mystery. Science as a struggle for and against nature. 1980, ISBN 3-608-95452- X.
  • Remarks. 1981, ISBN 3-12-901631-7.
  • Warning signs. The past speaks to the present. 1982, ISBN 3-608-95004-4.
  • Criticism of the future. Essay. 1983, ISBN 3-608-93576-2.
  • Poems. Private pressure. 1985 ( one-time edition of 1,000 copies ).
  • Testimony. Essays on language and science. 1985, ISBN 3-608-95373-6.
  • Abhorrence of world history. Fragments from the human. 1988, ISBN 3-608-93531-2.
  • Alphabetical attacks. 1989, ISBN 3-608-95646-8.
  • Preliminary end. A three week. 1990, ISBN 3-608-95443-0.
  • Legacy. Essays. 1992, ISBN 3-608-95851-7.
  • About the living. Selected essays. 1993, ISBN 3-608-95976-9.
  • Arm America - Poor world. 1994, ISBN 3-608-93291-7.
  • A second life. Autobiographical and other texts. 1995, ISBN 3-608-93313-1.
  • The view from the 13th floor. New essays. 1998, ISBN 3-608-93433-2.
  • Serious questions. Essays. 2000, ISBN 3-608-93420-0.
  • Breviary of premonitions. A selection from the factory. 2002, ISBN 3-608-93513-4.
  • Voices in the labyrinth. About nature and its exploration. 2003, ISBN 3-608-93580-0.

Awards and Affiliations

Obituaries

  • Lothar Jaenicke: The Torch of Erwin Chargaff and the fire of Heraclitus eat their children. Angewandte Chemie 114, 2002, pp. 4387-4390.
  • Lothar Jaenicke: A fighter with specialists. News from chemistry 50, 2002, pp. 1228-1231.
Austrian American Double helix (disambiguation) Karl Kraus (writer) Integrated Authority File
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