He completed clinical work experience at the medical schools of Frankfurt am Main and Würzburg and physiology-biochemistry studies at Bonn, that led to his first publications, an award from the University of Madrid and an invitation to work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Experimental Therapy and Biochemistry with Carl Neuberg.

Gottschalk left the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biochemistry in 1926 to become Director of the Biochemical Department at the General Hospital in Stettin.

He was offered a position as a biochemist by Charles Kellaway, director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI).

As Burnet stated: “In the world of biochemistry the most important contribution of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute is regarded as Gottschalk’s discovery of the structure of the sialic acids and his recognition that an enzyme which I had characterised biologically was chemically a neuraminidase.

He returned to West Germany in 1963, where he was appointed Guest-Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Virus Research in Tübingen.