Max Delbrück

Max Delbrück ( September 4, 1906 in Berlin, † March 9, 1981 in Pasadena, California ) was a German, from 1945 American geneticist, biophysicist and Nobel laureate.

Biography

Family

Delbrück was one of those originally from Alfeld on the Leine in Lower Saxony derived Delbrück family, which held some positions of influence in the 19th century in Prussia and the German Empire. He was the youngest son of the historian Hans Delbrück (1848-1929) and Carolina ( Lina ) Thiersch, a granddaughter of the chemist Justus von Liebig ( 1803-1873 ) and sister of the theologian Adolf von Harnack ( 1851-1930 ). The chemist Max Delbrück was his uncle.

Delbrück was married to Mary Bruce since 1941. The couple had four children.

Education and work

Delbrück studied at the University of Göttingen first astronomy. There is a choice of this subject he said:

"I wanted to have an area, which dropped me off most of all other members of the family. I come from a very rich family personality. I was the youngest of, and no one else knew anything about science and even less of astronomy. "

Delbrück was then but about the newly discovered quantum mechanics to theoretical physics. In this field he has a doctorate in 1929. On physical area the Delbrück scattering in quantum electrodynamics ( scattering of high-energy photons at the Coulomb field of a nucleus of the creation and annihilation of electron-positron pairs ) is named after him.

After several stays abroad, he worked from 1932 at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin- Dahlem, including as assistant to Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn. The non-governmental institute also maintained under the rule of National Socialism a certain independence and so attracted international researchers.

At the suggestion of Niels Bohr here he turned to the interdisciplinary work with biology, which he later commented as follows:

"In the mid '30s, there were interested in the theoretical physicists, particularly Bohr, for the mystery of life. Finally, it is a strange thing, that people create humans, cats produce cats and corn produced maize. That does not seem to be in physics and chemistry in it. Atoms do not make the same atoms. "

In 1935, he published together with the geneticist Nikolai Timofeev - Ressowski and the physicist Karl Günther room a work on gene mutations in which they proposed as the first to conceive genes as complex atomic associations. Thus began the modern genetics.

1937, the political influence research had become too large; Delbrück emigrated first as a research fellow in the United States. There, he conducted research at Caltech and offered since 1945 in the professional world acclaimed summer courses in New York. In the autumn of 1939 ended the scholarship he received through the use of a physics professor colleagues at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, from 1947 Delbruck worked again at Caltech - bacteriophages. In the late 1940s, he worked closely with Salvador Luria, with whom he was clarifying the propagation process of bacteriophages in Luria - Delbrück experiment among others. Even with Alfred Day Hershey he exchanged soon from information. With their investigations, scientists created the three foundations of modern molecular biology and genetics.

For this he received in 1969 along with Hershey and Luria the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

"The whole thing with the Nobel Prize is so a funny thing. Suddenly, overnight, becomes a television star. How did you come to? You come to like the Virgin with the child. You do not know how. "

As a professor of biology at Caltech (until 1977 ), he conducted research on a number of areas. The focus was on next to the sensory physiology and the quantum chemistry and mutations, such as the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.

Delbrück 1947 traveled for the first time back to Germany, but moved his center of life thither again. One of his first post-war student in Germany was the geneticist Carsten Bresch. From 1958 built Bresch, appointed by Delbrück, a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation, the Cologne botanist Joseph Straub had opened, the Institute of Genetics at the University of Cologne. From 1961 to 1963 Delbrück research at the new Cologne Institute and helped to establish this. This first molecular genetic - oriented research institute in Germany was a model for the establishment of other such institutions. In 1969, he helped the University of Konstanz to build their biological faculty. In 1963 he was elected a member of the Learned Society Leopoldina.

Delbrück's merit in the broader sense is mainly the introduction of mathematical models and scientific methods in biology. His appeal to interdisciplinarity and the open cooperation of the scientific community, which he supported by his own example, made school and earned him recognition.

Honors

• Since 1992, the Max - Delbrück - Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC ), a molecular biology research center of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres in Berlin-Buch, named after him.
• Since 1992, the MDC gives the Max Delbrück Medal for outstanding achievements in the field of medical research.
• Several streets were named after him, inter alia, several times in Berlin and Bremen in Gelsenkirchen, Heringsdorf and Leverkusen.