Cool Science-y Tidbits

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Eduard Buchner (1860-1917) was a German chemist.  Around the turn of the 20th century, there was a lot of arguing about whether yeast cells were required for fermentation, or whether there was a compound in the yeast cells that was responsible.  Buchner settled things once and for all.  In what sounds like a pretty tedious process, he ground yeast along with sand and diatomaceous earth with a mortar and pestle and extracted the resulting goo.  Microscopic examination showed no yeast cells.  Buchner was a vitalist (one of those convinced that fermentation could only arise from living yeast cells), so we can well imagine his surprise when he added sugar - intended as a preservative - to the goo and it began to ferment.  A little more fiddling about and Buchner was able to isolate the compound responsible and called it 'zymase', one of the first half-dozen or so enzymes to be discovered.  Buchner won the 1907 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work.

In 1914, in a fit of patriotic pride, Buchner volunteered for the German army in WWI and was killed by a shell fragment in 1917.  Some fifty years earlier, Louis Pasteur volunteered for the Franco-Prussian War.  The French authorities patted him soothingly on the head (metaphorically speaking), pointed out that his scientific work was much more valuable to France than one middle-aged soldier, and sent him back to his laboratory.

Stupid Germans.

Boru