Viktor Hamburger

Viktor Hamburger ( born July 9, 1900 in Landshut (Silesia ), † June 12, 2001 in St. Louis ) was a German evolutionary biologist and pioneer of neuroembryology.

Life and work

Hamburg, the son of a merchant family, studied zoology at Breslau, Heidelberg and Munich and went in 1920 to the Albert -Ludwigs- University of Freiburg Hans Spemann, where he in 1925 received his doctorate with a thesis on the influence of the nervous system on limb development in frogs. After years assistant at Alfred Kühn in Göttingen and Otto Mangold in Berlin, he returned as a lecturer to Freiburg. In 1932 he was able to go to the University of Chicago through a grant to the zoologist Frank Rattray Lillie ( 1870-1947 ) of the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1933 he was dismissed because of his Jewish origin in Freiburg, which he was denied a return to Germany. However, he managed an academic career in the United States: In 1935, he was appointed Assistant Professor in 1941, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Zoology at Washington University in St. Louis, where he remained until after his retirement in 1969.

Hamburgers known work, with over 4000 quotes one of the most cited publications in biology, is a detailed description of the stages of development of the chick embryo. That person, the Hamburger -Hamilton stages Staging is also still used by developmental biologists. Great importance had his work on the identification of the nerve growth factor; Rita Levi Montalcini and Stanley Cohen, received the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for this implemented in the 1950s, Hamburgers laboratory work in 1986.

In 1953, Hamburg Member of the National Academy of Sciences, 1959, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received honorary doctorates from the Washington University, Uppsala University and Rockefeller University. In 1983 he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize - 1989 with the National Medal of Science, and in 1985 he received the Ralph W. Gerard Prize -.

The architect Rudolf Hamburger was his brother.

Writings (selection )

• V. Hamburger: Manual of Experimental Embryology. University of Chicago Press, 1942.
• V. Hamburger: The Heritage of Experimental Embryology: Hans Spemann and the Organizer. Oxford University Press, 1988, ISBN 0-19-505110-6.