Reinhart Heinrich

Reinhart Heinrich ( born April 24, 1946 in Dresden, † October 23, 2006 in Berlin) was a German biophysicist. He worked from 1979 as a lecturer and from 1993 until his death as professor of theoretical biophysics at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and is a co-founder of systems biology. His most important scientific achievement was the early 1970s, his contribution to the formulation of the metabolic control theory for the quantitative modeling of metabolic pathways.

Life

Reinhart Heinrich was born in 1946 in Dresden and initially lived with his parents in Kuibyshev in the Soviet Union, where his father Helmut Heinrich, lecturer or later professor of applied mathematics in Breslau and Dresden, operating under reparations in the aircraft was. He closed by the return of the family in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) his schooling in his hometown now and then studied physics at the Technical University of Dresden, where he in 1971 with a thesis on solid state physics also received his doctorate.

He then moved to the Samuel Mitja Rapoport led by the Institute of Biochemistry of the Charité. He obtained a doctorate there in 1977 B, which corresponded in the GDR habilitation, and was then at the Institute of Biophysics of Mathematics and Natural Sciences Faculty of the Humboldt University of Berlin operates. There he functioned since 1979 as a lecturer and from 1993 until his death as professor of theoretical biophysics. From 1997 to 2006, he led by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft ( DFG) Research Training Group "Dynamics and Evolution of Cellular and macromolecular processes."

Reinhart Heinrich, who also published a philosophical- autobiographical novel and a book of poetry in addition to his scientific work, was married and the father of a son and a daughter. He died in 2006 in Berlin.

Scientific work

Reinhart Heinrich published during his career of more than 160 scientific publications and served as Associate Editor of the journal PLoS Computational Biology. When his best-known and most influential power applies his contribution to the development of metabolic control theory, a mathematical system for the quantitative description of metabolic pathways from the concentrations and the flow of chemical species. The theory, which he shared with Tom Rapoport developed under his habilitation at the beginning of the 1970s and published, was simultaneously and independently, and designed at the University of Edinburgh with a different terminology by Henrik Kacser ( 1918-1995 ) and Jim Burns and later extended to the application for the description of signal and Genregulationswegen.

Based on this work, he made fundamental contributions to the mathematical modeling and analysis of metabolic systems such as the metabolism of the erythrocytes, the changes in the concentration of calcium in cells and glycolysis in yeasts. In addition, he was concerned with the quantitative description of membrane and of signal transduction, with the design and optimization of enzymes, thermodynamics and kinetics of biochemical reactions, as well as general theoretical aspects of modeling biological systems.

In many of the research of Reinhart Heinrich, the concept of optimality has played a central role in biology. As Optimalitäskriterium he used inter alia to maximize the flux through metabolic pathways. He found in the investigation of the optimal stoichiometry of the glycolysis, that the observed real yield of two moles of adenosine triphosphate (ATP ) per mole of glucose to maximize the rate of ATP synthesis. These investigations were continued by several of his students, including his successor Edda Klipp and Thomas Pfeiffer and Stefan Schuster. Among his pupils also include Matthias Gaestel, Volkmar Heinrich (no relation ) and Thomas Höfer.

Awards and commemoration

Reinhart Heinrich received the 1996 honorary doctorate from the University of Bordeaux II and was inducted into the Leibniz law firm in 2004. In 2008, the Journal of Theoretical Biology published to commemorate him a special edition. The European Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Biology ( ESMTB ) gives the Reinhart Heinrich Doctoral Thesis Award for the best dissertation in the field of mathematical and theoretical biology annually.

For his 1987 New in the publishing life first published novel, " Beyond Babylon " Reinhart Heinrich was in East Germany after the publication awarded a year with the verliehenem by the county council Erfurt Louis- Fürnberg Prize and the Brigitte Reimann Prize of the Writers Union of the GDR.

Works (selection)

Basics of metabolic control theory (together with Tom A. Rapoport )

• Linear theory of enzymatic chains; Its Application for the Analysis of the crossover theorem and of the Glycolysis of human Erythrocytes. In: Acta Biologica et Medica Germanica. 31/1973, pp. 479-494
• A linear steady-state treatment of enzymatic chains. General Properties, Control and Effector Strength. In: European Journal of Biochemistry. 42/1974, pp. 89-95
• A linear steady-state treatment of enzymatic chains. Critique of the crossover theorem and a general procedure to identify interaction sites with at Effector. In: European Journal of Biochemistry. 42/1974, pp. 97-105

Monographs and contributions to monographs

• Metabolic Control Analysis: Principles and Application to the Erythrocyte. In: Control of Metabolic Processes. New York 1990, pp. 329-342
• The Regulation of Cellular Systems. New York 1996 ( with Stefan Schuster )
• Predicting the structural design of metabolic pathways: An evolutionary approach. In Technological and Medical Implications of Metabolic Control Analysis. Dordrecht 2000, pp. 309-317
• Mathematical Modeling of the Wnt pathway. In: Systems Biology: Definitions and Perspectives. Series: Topics in current genetics. Volume 13, Berlin and New York 2005, pp. 259-275

Stories and poems

• Reinhart Heinrich. Series: Poetry album. 118 tape Verlag Neues Leben, Berlin 1977
• Beyond Babylon. Verlag Neues Leben, Berlin, 1987 ( second edition 1989). ISBN 3-355-00360-3