Eduard Buchner

Eduard Buchner
Born	(1860-05-20)20 May 1860 Munich, German Confederation
Died	13 August 1917(1917-08-13) (aged 57) Munich, German Empire
Nationality	Germany
Fields	Biochemistry
Alma mater	University of Munich
Doctoral advisor	Otto Fischer, Adolf von Baeyer
Known for	Mannich reaction
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1907)

Eduard Buchner (20 May 1860 – 13 August 1917) was a German chemist and zymologist, awarded with the 1907 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on fermentation.

Biography

Early years

Buchner was born in Munich to a physician and Doctor Extraordinary of Forensic Medicine. His older brother was Hans Ernst August Buchner.^[1] In 1884, he began studies of chemistry with Adolf von Baeyer and of botany with Professor C. von Naegeli, at the Botanic Institute in Munich. After a period working with Hermann Emil Fischer in Erlangen, Buchner was awarded a doctorate from the University of Munich in 1888.

Research

The experiment for which Buchner won the Nobel Prize consisted of producing a cell-free extract of yeast cells and showing that this "press juice" could ferment sugar. This dealt yet another blow to vitalism by showing that the presence of living yeast cells was not needed for fermentation. The cell-free extract was produced by combining dry yeast cells, quartz and kieselguhr and then pulverizing the yeast cells with a pestle and mortar. This mixture would then become moist as the yeast cells' contents would come out of the cells. Once this step was done, the moist mixture would be put through a press and the resulting "press juice" had glucose, fructose, or maltose added and carbon dioxide was seen to evolve, sometimes for days. Microscopic investigation revealed no living yeast cells in the extract. Buchner hypothesized that yeast cells secrete proteins into their environment in order to ferment sugars, but it was later found that fermentation occurs inside the yeast cells. Maria Manasseina claimed to have discovered free-cell fermentation a generation earlier than Buchner.^[2]

Though it is believed by some that the Büchner flask and the Büchner funnel are named for him, they are actually named for the industrial chemist Ernst Büchner.^[3]

Buchner received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1907.

Personal life

Buchner married Lotte Stahl in 1900. During World War I, Buchner served as a Major in a front-line field hospital at Focşani, Romania. He was wounded on August 3, 1917 and died of these wounds nine days later in Munich at age 57.^[4]

Publications

• Eduard Buchner (1897). "Alkoholische Gärung ohne Hefezellen (Vorläufige Mitteilung)". Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft 30: 117–124.  
• Eduard Buchner, Rudolf Rapp (1899). "Alkoholische Gärung ohne Hefezellen". Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft 32 (2): 2086.  
• Robert Kohler (1971). "The background to Eduard Buchner's discovery of cell-free fermentation". Journal of the History of Biology 4 (1): 35–61.  
• Robert Kohler (1972). "The reception of Eduard Buchner's discovery of cell-free fermentation". Journal of the History of Biology 5 (2): 327–353.  

References

1. ^ Asimov, Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology 2nd Revised edition
2. ^ Athel Cornish-Bowden (1999). "The Origins of Enzymology." // The Biochemist 19(2), 36–38.
3. ^ Jensen, William (2006). "The Origins of the Hirsch and Büchner Vacuum Filtration Funnels". Journal of Chemical Education 83 (9): 1283.  
4. ^ Ukrow, Rolf (2004). Nobelpreisträger Eduard Buchner (1860 – 1917) Ein Leben für die Chemie der Gärungen und - fast vergessen - für die organische Chemie (German) (PDF). Berlin. 

External links

• Buchner's Nobel Lecture Cell Free Fermentation
• Biography
• Buchner, Eduard (1897). "Alcoholic Fermentation Without Yeast Cells". Ber. Dt. Chem. Ges. 30: 117–124.  (English translation of Buchner's "Alkoholische Gährung ohne Hefezellen")

Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1901–1925 1901 Jacobus van 't Hoff 1902 Emil Fischer 1903 Svante Arrhenius 1904 William Ramsay 1905 Adolf von Baeyer 1906 Henri Moissan 1907 Eduard Buchner 1908 Ernest Rutherford 1909 Wilhelm Ostwald 1910 Otto Wallach 1911 Marie Curie 1912 Victor Grignard / Paul Sabatier 1913 Alfred Werner 1914 Theodore Richards 1915 Richard Willstätter 1916 1917 1918 Fritz Haber 1919 1920 Walther Nernst 1921 Frederick Soddy 1922 Francis Aston 1923 Fritz Pregl 1924 1925 Richard Zsigmondy 1926–1950 1926 Theodor Svedberg 1927 Heinrich Wieland 1928 Adolf Windaus 1929 Arthur Harden / Hans von Euler-Chelpin 1930 Hans Fischer 1931 Carl Bosch / Friedrich Bergius 1932 Irving Langmuir 1933 1934 Harold Urey 1935 Frédéric Joliot-Curie / Irène Joliot-Curie 1936 Peter Debye 1937 Norman Haworth / Paul Karrer 1938 Richard Kuhn 1939 Adolf Butenandt / Leopold Ružička 1940 1941 1942 1943 George de Hevesy 1944 Otto Hahn 1945 Artturi Virtanen 1946 James B. Sumner / John Northrop / Wendell Meredith Stanley 1947 Robert Robinson 1948 Arne Tiselius 1949 William Giauque 1950 Otto Diels / Kurt Alder 1951–1975 1951 Glenn T. Seaborg 1952 Archer Martin / Richard Synge 1953 Hermann Staudinger 1954 Linus Pauling 1955 Vincent du Vigneaud 1956 Cyril Hinshelwood / Nikolay Semyonov 1957 Alexander Todd 1958 Frederick Sanger 1959 Jaroslav Heyrovský 1960 Willard Libby 1961 Melvin Calvin 1962 Max Perutz / John Kendrew 1963 Karl Ziegler / Giulio Natta 1964 Dorothy Hodgkin 1965 Robert Woodward 1966 Robert S. Mulliken 1967 George Porter 1968 Lars Onsager 1969 Derek Barton / Odd Hassel 1970 Luis Federico Leloir 1971 Gerhard Herzberg 1972 Christian B. Anfinsen / Stanford Moore / William Stein 1973 Ernst Otto Fischer / Geoffrey Wilkinson 1974 Paul Flory 1975 John Cornforth / Vladimir Prelog 1976–2000 1976 William Lipscomb 1977 Ilya Prigogine 1978 Peter D. Mitchell 1979 Georg Wittig 1980 Paul Berg / Walter Gilbert / Frederick Sanger 1981 Kenichi Fukui / Roald Hoffmann 1982 Aaron Klug 1983 Henry Taube 1984 Robert Merrifield 1985 Herbert A. Hauptman / Jerome Karle 1986 Dudley R. Herschbach / Yuan T. Lee / John Polanyi 1987 Donald J. Cram / Jean-Marie Lehn / Charles J. Pedersen 1988 Johann Deisenhofer / Robert Huber / Hartmut Michel 1989 Sidney Altman / Thomas Cech 1990 Elias Corey 1991 Richard R. Ernst 1992 Rudolph A. Marcus 1993 Kary Mullis / Michael Smith 1994 George Olah 1995 Paul J. Crutzen / Mario J. Molina / Frank Rowland 1996 Robert Curl / Harold Kroto / Richard Smalley 1997 Paul D. Boyer / John E. Walker / Jens Christian Skou 1998 Walter Kohn / John Pople 1999 Ahmed Zewail 2000 Alan J. Heeger / Alan MacDiarmid / Hideki Shirakawa 2001–present 2001 William Knowles / Ryoji Noyori / K. Barry Sharpless 2002 John B. Fenn / Koichi Tanaka / Kurt Wüthrich 2003 Peter Agre / Roderick MacKinnon 2004 Aaron Ciechanover / Avram Hershko / Irwin Rose 2005 Robert H. Grubbs / Richard R. Schrock / Yves Chauvin 2006 Roger D. Kornberg 2007 Gerhard Ertl 2008 Osamu Shimomura / Martin Chalfie / Roger Y. Tsien 2009 Venkatraman Ramakrishnan / Thomas A. Steitz / Ada E. Yonath 2010 Richard F. Heck / Akira Suzuki / Ei-ichi Negishi 2011 Dan Shechtman 2012 Robert Lefkowitz / Brian Kobilka 2013 Martin Karplus / Michael Levitt / Arieh Warshel 2014 Eric Betzig / Stefan Hell / William E. Moerner 2015 Tomas Lindahl / Paul L. Modrich / Aziz Sancar