Gunther Stent

Gunther S. Stent ( born March 28, 1924 as Gunther Siegmund Stensch in Berlin- Treptow, † 12 June 2008 in Haverford, Pennsylvania) was an American molecular biologist, neuroscientist and philosopher of science.

Life

Stents father Georg Karfunkelstein Stensch in Berlin had a thriving factory for cast bronze and lighting. Stent visited the Bismarck Academy and after he was thrown out as a Jew out of this, a Jewish private school ( Priwaki school). 1938 left his native Germany, while stent initially stayed with his stepmother in Berlin. He then fled to Antwerp in November 1938 and then 1940, England and Canada in the United States, where he went to Chicago, where his sister lived at the school. He studied from 1942 physical chemistry at the University of Illinois, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1945 and his doctorate in 1948. Then he turned to molecular biology ( under the influence of a lecture by Sol Spiegelman and reading by Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? ). He went to Max Delbrück Caltech and visited the famous course in phage research in the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. In 1950 he taught in Copenhagen and in 1951 at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. From 1952, he was ( as Associate Professor ) at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a professor of molecular biology and board 1980 to 1986 the Department of Molecular Biology and thereafter until 1992, the converted Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. In 1995, he went into retirement.

He was married twice ( his first wife Inga Loftsdottir stent died in 1993, his second wife he was married to Mary Ulam ) and had a son.

Work

Stent was in the 1950s one of the pioneers of molecular biology and phage research. His studies of phage ( 1954), where radioactive phosphorus was incorporated into the genes and their inactivation by the radioactive decay of phosphorus he examined, were an early confirmation of the research by James D. Watson and Francis Crick of the double helix nature of the genetic material. The early collaboration with Watson and Crick in Europe around 1952 is described in Watson's biographical book The Double Helix, whose new edition stent concerned with. He wrote an early influential introductory textbook on molecular biology. Later he worked on (after a sabbatical year at Harvard Medical School) with neurobiology, he studied at sea snails. Among others, he has been known there for an essay of 1973 on the impact of learning on synapses.

He also published on philosophy of science, which he turned from the late 1960s ( when he was in a book of 1969, a little premature - as he admitted himself later - the end of molecular biology and general science due to its own success predicted ), and history of biology. His book Paradoxes of Free Will received the 2002 John F. Lewis Award of the American Philosophical Society.

In 1966 he was appointed " External Scientific Member" of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin- Dahlem.

Writings

• Molecular biology of bacterial viruses, Freeman, San Francisco 1963
• Molecular Genetics. An introductory narrative, Freeman, San Francisco, 1971 ( translated into Russian, Italian, Spanish and Japanese, a revision of his book from 1963 )
• With James D. Watson, John Cairns ( ed.): Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 1966, 1992, 2007 ( the first edition was also translated into German in 1972 ).
• Nazis, Woman and Molecular Biology. Memoirs of a lucky self- hater, Kensington, California Briones Books 1998 ( autobiography)
• With Max Delbrück: truth and reality. About the evolution of the knowledge quickly and Röhring 1986 ( English original: Mind rom matt An essay on evolutionary epistemology, Palo Alto 1986? )
• Paradoxes of progress, Freeman, San Francisco 1978
• The coming of the golden age. A view of the end of progress, American Museum of Natural History 1969 ( from lectures at Berkeley )
• As editor: Morality as a biological phenomenon. Report of the Dahlem Workshop on Biology and Morals, November 1977, Berkeley, University of California Press 1980
• Paradoxes of free will, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Volume 92, 2002
• Ethical dilemmas of human biology, Mannheim Forum 82/83
• The autonomy of man. Complexity and complementarity of mind, Mannheim Forum 92/93
• Judith Martin: Bioetikette. About decency and good manners in science, Mannheim Forum 96/97