(May 28, 2019 at 2:47 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: 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
Unfortunately in that horrible war, there was only one soldier that was worth milions...
