![]() |
Eduard BuhnerChemist
Date of Birth: 20.05.1860
Country: ![]() |
Biography of Eduard Buchner
Eduard Buchner was a German chemist and biochemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was born in Munich, Germany, into a family of academics. His father, Ernst Buchner, was a professor of forensic medicine and gynecology at the University of Munich, while his mother, Frederike (Martin) Buchner, was the daughter of a Royal Treasury official. After his father's death in 1872, Buchner's education was overseen by his older brother, Hans.
Buchner completed his secondary education at a real gymnasium in Munich in 1877. He then briefly served in the German army's artillery division before enrolling at the Technical University of Munich to study chemistry. However, financial difficulties forced him to quit his studies and work at canning factories in Munich and Mombach for four years. It was during this time that he became familiar with the process of alcoholic fermentation, in which sugar is converted into alcohol and carbon dioxide by yeast.
With the help of his brother Hans, Buchner was able to resume his studies in 1884. He received a three-year scholarship and studied chemistry under Adolf von Baeyer at the University of Munich and botany under Karl von Nageli at the Botanical Institute. It was in this institute that Hans Buchner, who later became a renowned specialist in hygiene and bacteriology, worked. Under his guidance, Buchner began researching the process of alcoholic fermentation. In 1885, he published his first paper on the influence of oxygen on fermentation, which contradicted the prevailing belief at the time, held by Louis Pasteur, that fermentation could not occur in the presence of oxygen.
Buchner obtained his doctorate degree in 1888 and, two years later, became an assistant to Baeyer after a short period spent in Erlangen. In 1891, Buchner was appointed a privat-docent (assistant professor) at the University of Munich. With the private donations provided by Baeyer, Buchner established a small laboratory where he continued his research on fermentation chemistry. In 1893, he left Munich and became the head of the analytical chemistry section at the University of Kiel, and in 1895, he became a professor at the same university. The following year, Buchner taught analytical chemistry and pharmacology at the University of Tübingen. In 1898, he was elected a professor of general chemistry at the Higher Agricultural School in Berlin and appointed the director of the Institute for Industrial Application of Fermentation Processes.
In 1893, when Buchner began his search for active substances promoting fermentation, there were two competing theories of fermentation. According to the mechanistic theory, yeast constantly decomposes into a liquid state, creating chemical tension that causes the breakdown of sugar molecules. According to this point of view, alcoholic fermentation was a complex but ultimately ordinary chemical reaction. This theory was opposed by vitalists, who, like Louis Pasteur, believed that living cells contained some vital substance responsible for fermentation. According to them, without this yet-to-be-discovered "vital" component in living cells, mere chemical substances could not induce the process of fermentation. Although proponents of the mechanistic theory had demonstrated that substances found in living cells could be synthesized, no one had yet isolated a substance that promoted fermentation or induced this process in non-living substances.
Encouraged by his brother, Buchner decided to find the active substance by obtaining pure samples of the internal fluid of yeast cells. Using a method proposed by his brother's assistant, Martin Hahn, Buchner ground yeast together with sand and earth, avoiding the destructive effects of high temperatures and avoiding the use of solvents that distorted the results obtained by his predecessors. The squeezed spongy substance released a liquid. Buchner hypothesized that this liquid was capable of inducing fermentation. However, when he and Hahn tried to preserve this liquid by adding a concentrated solution of sucrose, carbon dioxide was released. This was remarkable because, even though the yeast cells were dead, it was clear that something in the liquid they had extracted had caused fermentation. Buchner proposed that the active substance was an enzyme, or ferment, which he named zymase. His discovery meant that fermentation occurred as a result of the chemical activity of the enzyme both inside and outside the yeast cell, rather than under the influence of the so-called vital force. His published work in 1897, titled "On Alcoholic Fermentation without Yeast Cells," sparked controversy among his fellow scientists, and in the following years, Buchner spent a considerable amount of time gathering evidence to support his theory. In 1902, he published another 15-page article explaining and defending his work, as well as several others presenting the results of his research on the chemical effects of yeast on lactose.
In 1907, Buchner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his scientific research in biological chemistry and the discovery of extracellular fermentation. Due to the death of King Oscar II of Sweden, the award ceremony was postponed, but in the written presentation on behalf of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, C.A.X. Merner summarized the conflicting views on fermentation that Buchner's research had put to rest. "As long as fermentation was considered to be an expression of life," wrote Merner, "there was little hope of delving deeper into the process. The sensation was therefore great when Buchner succeeded in showing that alcoholic fermentation can be caused by juice emanating from yeast cells that do not contain living cells... Regions that had remained unexplored until then became the object of chemical research, and new perspectives previously unseen were opened up to chemical science." In his Nobel Lecture, Buchner described his discoveries and acknowledged his predecessors and colleagues. "We are increasingly convinced," he said, "that plant and animal cells resemble chemical factories, where different products are manufactured in different departments. Enzymes play the role of controllers. Our knowledge of these most important parts of living matter is constantly increasing. And although we may still be far from our goal, step by step, we are getting closer to it."
Two years after receiving the Nobel Prize, Buchner moved to the University of Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), where he became the head of the department of physiological chemistry. His final academic appointment was at the University of Würzburg in 1911. With the outbreak of World War I, Buchner voluntarily joined the military. In 1917, while serving as a major in the medical service at a field hospital in Romania, he was wounded by shrapnel and died in Focșani on August 13, having outlived his wife Lotte (Stahl) Buchner, the daughter of a mathematician from Tübingen. They had two sons and a daughter from their marriage, which took place in 1900.