Felix Hoppe-Seyler
| Felix Hoppe-Seyler | |
|---|---|
 Felix Hoppe-Seyler |
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| Born | December 26, 1825 Freyburg an der Unstrut in the Province of Saxony |
| Died | August 10, 1895 Wasserburg am Bodensee |
| Nationality | German |
| Fields | physiology chemistry |
| Institutions | Halle Leipzig |
Ernst Felix Immanuel Hoppe-Seyler (December 26, 1825 – August 10, 1895) was a German physiologist and chemist.
Hoppe-Seyler was born in Freyburg an der Unstrut in the Province of Saxony. He originally trained to be a physician in Halle and Leipzig, and received his medical doctorate from Berlin in 1851. Afterwards, he was an assistant to Rudolf Virchow at the Pathological Institute in Berlin. Hoppe-Seyler preferred scientific research to medicine, and later held positions in anatomy, applied chemistry, and physiological chemistry in Greifswald, Tübingen and Strasbourg. At Strasbourg, he was head of the department of biochemistry, the only such institution in Germany at the time.[1]
He was one of the founders of biochemistry, physiological chemistry and molecular biology, and his work led to advances in organic chemistry by his students and by immunologist Paul Ehrlich. Among his students and collaborators were Friedrich Miescher (1844–1895) and Nobel laureate Albrecht Kossel (1853–1927).[1]
His numerous investigations include studies of blood, hemoglobin, pus, bile, milk, and urine. Hoppe-Seyler was the first scientist to describe the optical absorption spectrum of the red blood pigment and its two distinctive absorption bands. He also recognized the binding of oxygen to erythrocytes as a function of hemoglobin, which in turn creates the compound oxyhemoglobin. Hoppe-Seyler was able to obtain hemoglobin in crystalline form, and confirmed that it contained iron.
Hoppe-Seyler performed studies of chlorophyll, and is credited with the isolation of several different proteins (which he called proteids). He was also the first to purify lecithin and establish its composition. In 1877 he founded the Zeitschrift für Physiologische Chemie (Journal for Physiological Chemistry), and was its editor until his death in 1895.[1] He died in Wasserburg am Bodensee in the Kingdom of Bavaria.
[edit] Selected written works
- Handbuch der physiologisch und pathologisch-chemischen Analyse (1858)
- Physiologische Chemie (4 volumes, 1877–81)
- Zeitschrift für Physiologische Chemie (1877–1921)
[edit] External links
- Photo, biography, and bibliography in the Virtual Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
- Chem-342 Introduction to Biochemistry
- Biography and photos at the website of Biological Chemistry (a journal founded by Felix Hoppe-Seyler)
[edit] References
- ^ a b c Jones, Mary Ellen (September 1953). "Albrecht Kossel, A Biographical Sketch". Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine (National Center for Biotechnology Information) 26: 80–97. PMC 2599350. PMID 13103145. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=2599350.
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- 1825 births
- 1895 deaths
- German chemists
- German physiologists
- People from the Province of Saxony
- University of Halle-Wittenberg alumni
- University of Leipzig alumni
- Humboldt University of Berlin alumni
- Humboldt University of Berlin faculty
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