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Friday, July 3, 2020

Outstanding Jewish Biologists and What They Contributed to the World Despite Obstacles

Nadene Goldfoot

                                                                           
The Yiddishe mama's dream, My son, the doctor
                                                                         
Biology, the science of living organisms, had its basis laid down by Aristotle, a Greek non-Jew.  Aristotle (385 -323 BCE) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school of philosophy, and the Aristotelian tradition.   Some of Aristotle's zoological observations found in his biology, such as on the hectocotyl (reproductive) arm of the octopus, were disbelieved until the 19th century. 

His writings were reintroduced to the European world by medieval Jewish translators and Dioscorides, whose most well known Renaissance commentator was: 
                                                           

1. Amatus Lusitanus 1511- 1568) .  João Rodrigues de Castelo Branco, better known as Amato Lusitano and Amatus Lusitanus, was a notable Portuguese Jewish physician of the 16th century. Like Herophilus, Galen, Ibn al-Nafis, Michael Servetus, Realdo Colombo and William Harvey, he is credited as making a discovery in the circulation of the blood.  Through dissections of the Azygos vein, he was the first to observe and speculate about the venous valves found there.

This discovery contradicted the conventional belief of the time that the blood flows from the heart via the arteries as well as the veins. It is obvious that this hypothesis was supported by the fact that the network of arteries and veins becomes thinner and thinner as they get farther from the heart. It was also assumed that the networks are not connected, so the blood cannot pass from one network to the other. (The microscope was not yet invented, so one could not view capillary arteries without aid.)

"He was a descendant of a Marrano family called Chabib (= Amatus, "beloved" in Latin), and was brought up in the Jewish faith. After having graduated with honors as M.D. from the University of Salamanca, he was unable to return Portugal for fear of the Inquisition. He went to Antwerp for a time and then traveled through the Netherlands and France, finally settling in Italy. His reputation as one of the most skilful physicians of his time preceded him there, and during his short sojourn at Venice, where he came in contact with the physician and philosopher Jacob Mantino, he attended the niece of Pope Julius III and other distinguished personages."  His origins may have been Spain, as the Spanish Inquisition was in 1492, and Jews had to leave Spain or convert to Catholicism.  Many moved to Portugal, but then in a few years the inquisition caught up there as well, and Jews, then called Marranos; Jews who had to hide their faith , had to leave Portugal.  

              Jewish contributions to biology date from the period when
                                                       

 2.  Garcia D'Orta (1500- 1570) revolutionized botanical study.  Garcia de Orta was a Portuguese Renaissance Sephardi Jewish physician, herbalist and naturalist. He was a pioneer of tropical medicine, pharmacognosy and ethnobotany, working mainly in Goa, then a Portuguese overseas territory.  

His parents were Spanish Jews from Valencia de Alcántara who had taken refuge, as many others did, in Portugal at the time of the great expulsion of the Spanish Jews by the Reyes Catolicos Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain in 1492. Forcibly converted to Christianity in 1497, they were pejoratively classed as Cristãos Novos (New Christians) and marranos ("swine"). In other words, they were called swine which was a meat they would not eat.  

                                                 Later Dates
                                                           

3. Leopold Auerbach (1828-1897) German biologist, made contributions in Cellular Biology and histology.  Leopold was born in Breslau, Poland. He was an  anatomist and neuropathologist as well.  Auerbach was among the first physicians to diagnose the nervous system using histological staining methods. He published a number of papers on neuropathological problems and muscle-related disorders.  He is credited with the discovery of Plexus myentericus Auerbachi, or Auerbach's plexus, a layer of ganglion cells that provide control of movements of the gastro-intestinal tract, also known as the "myenteric plexus".
"Friedreich–Auerbach disease" is named after Auerbach and pathologist Nikolaus Friedreich (1825-1882). It is a rare disease characterized by hemi-ypertrophy of the facial features, tongue, and tonsils
                                                        

4. Robert Remak (1815-1865) Robert Remak was a Jewish Polish-German embryologist, physiologist, and neurologist, born in Posen, Prussia, who discovered that the origin of cells was by the division of pre-existing cells. as well as several other key discoveries.  He probed into the general problems of cellular development in animal life.
                                                         
     
5. Heinrich Caro (1834-1910) Heinrich Caro, was born in Prussia;   a German chemist. He was a Sephardic Jew;  quite possibly a descendant of Joseph Caro (1488-1575 of Toledo, Spain, of Safed, Israel where his synagogue stands today.   He started his study of chemistry at the Friedrich Wilhelms University and later chemistry and dyeing in Berlin at the Royal Trades Institute.  He discovered that synthetic dyes facilitated research by making possible the coloring of tissues and organisms.  By doing this he revolutionized the dyeing industry by his discoveries of aniline red, methylene blue, and phosgene dyes.  

Nikodem Caro (1871-1935) was also a German chemist and together with Adolf Frank, developed the cyanamide process for the fixation of nitrogen.  
                                                      

6. Ferdinand Julius Cohn (1828-1898) was a German biologist-botanist. He is one of the founders of modern bacteriology and microbiology. Cohn discovered the nature of bacteria, was the first to employ the term "bacillus," and made important contributions to combating plant disease and pests.  His researches finally disposed of the former widespread belief in "spontaneous generation."  Ferdinand J. Cohn was born in the Jewish quarter of Breslau in the Prussian Province of Silesia. His father, Issak Cohn, was a successful merchant and manufacturer. did investigations of bacteria and this helped to dispose of the theory of spontaneous generation and so prepared the ground for epoch -making advances.  He founded the Institute of Plant Physiology at Breslau U..  
This is Paolo Enriques the biologist-zoologist. 
                                                           
This actually is "Federigo Enriques, his older brother, both who were born in Livorno, and brought up in Pisa, in a Sephardi Jewish family of Portuguese descent. His younger brother was zoologist Paolo Enriques who was also the father of Enzo Enriques Agnoletti and Anna Maria Enriques Agnoletti. He became a student of Guido Castelnuovo (who later became his brother-in-law after marrying his sister Elbina), and became an important member of the Italian school of algebraic geometry. He also worked on differential geometry. He collaborated with Castelnuovo, Corrado Segre and Francesco Severi. He had positions at the University of Bologna, and then the University of Rome La Sapienza. He lost his position in 1938, when the Fascist government enacted the "leggi razziali" (racial laws), which in particular banned Jews from holding professorships in Universities. "  Talk about heredity--being intelligent
runs in families.  It's inherited.  


7 Paolo Enriques (1878-1932) Italian biologist-zoologist , studied the mechanics of heredity, formulating a 4th law of  independent variability in addition to the 3 of Mendel.  He was the brother of mathematician Federigo Enriques and the brother-in-law of another mathematician Guido Castelnuovo who married their sister Elbina. He married Maria Clotilde Agnoletti Fusconi and was the father of Anna Maria Enriques Agnoletti and Enzo Enriques Agnoletti.  He died in a car accident in Rome. He devoted four years to medicine, in which he qualified at Göttingen, and two to natural science, in which he took the doctor's degree at Bologna in 1901. In the following years he lectured at Florence on the philosophical approach to biology, at Sassari in medicine and later on comparative anatomy. While professor at Padua he also taught under the Faculty of Medicine in the Schools of Pharmacy and of Social Science, and for some years lectured on genetics applied to the breeding of silkworms at the Silkworm Station of Brusegana.


                                   Leading Jewish Biologist in the USA
                                                                

8. Jacques Loeb (1859-1924) Jacques Loeb, firstborn son of a Jewish family from the German Eifel region, was educated at the universities of Berlin, Munich, and Strasburg (M.D. 1884).Jacques Loeb was a German-born American physiologist and biologist who headed the department of experimental biology in the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and conducted basic experiments in artificial fertilization. Jacques Loeb performed his most famous experiment, on artificial parthenogenesis. With this experiment, Loeb was able to cause the sea urchins' eggs to begin embryonic development without sperm. The slight chemical modifications of the water in which the eggs were kept, served as the stimulus for the development to begin.  Jacques Loeb became one of the most famous scientists in America, widely covered in newspapers and magazines, influencing other important individuals in the scientific world such as B.F. Skinner. He was the model for the character of Max Gottlieb in Sinclair Lewis's Pulitzer-winning novel Arrowsmith, the first great work of fiction to idealize and idolize pure science. Mark Twain also wrote an essay titled "Dr. Loeb's Incredible Discovery", urging the reader not to support a rigid general consensus, but to instead be open to new scientific advances.  He never won a Nobel Prize, though was a contender many times.  
                                                            

9. Gregory Goodwin Pincus (1903-1967) "Gregory Goodwin Pincus was born in Woodbine, New Jersey, son of Joseph Pincus, a teacher and the editor of a farm journal, and the Latvian immigrant Elizabeth (née Lipman). He credited two uncles, both agricultural scientists, for his interest in research. His IQ was said to be 210 and his family considered him a genius."  I guess, since Einstein had an IQ of 180.   He was of Harvard U. who contributed much of experimental embryology and has studied the factors activating the process of fertilization.  Pincus was an American biologist and researcher who co-invented the combined oral contraceptive pill.
                                                              

10. "Herman Joseph Muller (1890-1967) Muller was born in New York City, the son of Frances (Lyons) and Hermann Joseph Muller, Sr., an artisan who worked with metals. Muller was a third-generation American whose father's ancestors were originally Catholic and came to the United States from Koblenz. His mother's family was of mixed Jewish (descended from Spanish and Portuguese Jews) and Anglican background, and had come from Britain."  Being his mother was Jewish, he is considered Jewish.   "Among his first cousins are Herbert J. Muller and Alfred Kroeber (Kroeber is Ursula Le Guin's father). As an adolescent, Muller attended a Unitarian church and considered himself a pantheist; in high school, he became an atheist. He excelled in the public schools. At 16, he entered Columbia College. From his first semester, he was interested in biology; he became an early convert of the Mendelian-chromosome theory of heredity — and the concept of genetic mutations and natural selection as the basis for evolution. He formed a biology club and also became a proponent of eugenics; the connections between biology and society would be his perennial concern.who did important work in genetics and heredity, and for his work on the artificial transmutation of the gene through X-rays.  He was awarded a Nobel Prize.  Hermann Joseph Muller was an American geneticist, educator, and Nobel laureate best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation, as well as his outspoken political beliefs."

Resource
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://thebestschools.org/features/50-influential-scientists-world-today/

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