He studied medicine and graduated in 1950 at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and joined the student fraternity Tübinger Königsgesellschaft Roigel only at a very late stage.
He wrote his doctoral thesis from 1947 to 1950 at Carl Martius and Adolf Butenandt about Experiments on the chemical synthesis of an organophosphate of citric acid (Versuche zur Darstellung eines Phosphorsäure-Esters der Citronensäure).
In his spare time he maintained two Suabian meadow orchards in Ammerbuch, and arranged regularly an annual hiking tour with his dental medicine students to these.
[citation needed] His scientific work – from the time of his doctorate until more than 20 years after becoming an emeritus – was based on the understanding of the reversibility of adsorption processes, as postulated by Irving Langmuir in his sorption isotherm.
He examined serums of humans, rats and guinea pigs and noted that these varied in their capability, to reduce the specific adsorption of veal insulin in filtration paper.
In this field of research one half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was given to Rosalyn Sussman Yalow in 1977 for the development of radioimmunological methods for the detection of peptide hormones.
Laboratory analysis before and after the infusion of large amounts of albumin gave a hint about a mechanism, by which albumin-bound substances were transported passively in the blood within the circulatory system into the extracellular fluid volume and the other way round.
His great-grandfather, General Eduard von Kallee was probably an illegitimate son of King William I of Württemberg and devoted himself after an unusually steep military and diplomatic career to literary, artistic and archaeological studies, during which discovered several Roman sites along the Limes Germanicus.