Helmut Ruska

Helmut Georg Philipp Ruska ( born June 7, 1908 in Heidelberg; † August 30, 1973 in Dusseldorf ) was a German physician and pioneer of electron microscopy.

Life

Helmut Ruska was born as the son of orientalist Julius Ruska (1867-1949) and Elizabeth Ruska, born Merx, ( 1874-1945 ). From 1927 to 1932 he studied medicine in Munich, Innsbruck, Berlin and Heidelberg. He received his Ph.D. in Ludolf von Krehl. In the years from 1936 he worked as an assistant to Richard Siebeck ( 1883-1965 ) at the First Medical Clinic of the Charité in Berlin, where in 1940 he earned his medical specialist in internal medicine, starting in 1943 at the Medical Clinic in Heidelberg. In the same year he completed his habilitation in Berlin with a thesis on the morphology of bacteriophages.

Between 1938 and 1945, Helmut Ruska was head of the Laboratory of Applied electron microscopy at Siemens & Halske AG, Berlin -Spandau, from 1944 Riems. In 1939 a first comprehensive publication on the structure of viruses (Arch. ges. Virus researchers. 1:155-69 ), 1943 he proposed the taxonomy of viruses according to morphological criteria (Arch. ges. Virus researchers. 2:480-98 ) ago.

1948-1951 was Ruska Professor with tenure at the University of Berlin, Head of the Dept. of micromorphology of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin-Buch and the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry Chemistry in Berlin- Dahlem. From 1952 to 1958 he was head of the Department of micromorphology at the New York State Department of Health with simultaneous activity at the Sloan -Kettering Institute for Cancer Research and an associate professor of Union University in Albany (New York). Starting in 1958, Ruska was director of the Institute of Biophysics and Electron Microscopy of the Medical Academy in Dusseldorf, which was transformed into the University of Dusseldorf in 1965.

Helmut Ruska is located next to his brother Ernst Ruska in the forest cemetery ( burial Dept. XX -AW 51) in Berlin- Zehlendorf buried.

Work

Ruska is considered a pioneer of medical and bioscience electron microscopy. Together with his brother Ernst Ruska and Bodo von Borries his brother, he developed the electron microscope to the production stage, where he drove forward in particular the use of new technology for the elucidation of biomedical questions. He made the world's first scientists viruses visible and laid the foundations of the existing until today Virustaxonomie. His work on the fine structure of molecules, organelles and cells (eg, fibrin in blood clotting, glycogen storage, plant chlorophyll, bacteria, epithelial, muscle, sensory and blood cells) were groundbreaking.

Awards and Affiliations

In 1956 Ruska the Aronson Award in Berlin. In 1962 he was appointed by the Max Planck Society External Scientific Member at the Fritz Haber Institute. 1970 was the physician to the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize jointly with his brother Ernst Ruska.