Moritz Traube
Although he was never a staff member of a university and earned his living as a wine merchant, he was able to refute theories of his leading contemporaries, including Justus von Liebig, Louis Pasteur, Felix Hoppe-Seyler and Julius Sachs, and to develop significant theories of his own with solid experimental foundations.
The chemistry of oxygen and its significance to the organism were the central objects of his research and provided the common thread uniting almost all of his scientific activity.
For a few weeks he attended lectures in clinical disciplines such as surgery (with Bernhard von Langenbeck) and auscultation and percussion (Ludwig Traube).
In a poorly-heated attic of his house, lacking time and money, isolated from scientific communication, he developed his extensive chemical-physiological projects.
He completed numerous well-planned, accurately executed experiments, the correctness of which his contemporaries were forced to acknowledge.
He worked for a time in the laboratory of his friend Theodor Poleck and in the Physiological Institute of Rudolf Heidenhain.
Traube showed that sugar excretion in the urine of a diabetic patient rose after starch intake but fell after protein consumption.
For diagnosis he proposed to measure sugar levels at specific, regular intervals: in the morning before breakfast and after meals.
To defend his theory, Traube had to argue vigorously against Louis Pasteur and Felix Hoppe-Seyler.
In 1864 Traube was the first to produce artificial semipermeable membranes, recognizing them as molecular sieves and using them in developing the first physical-chemical theory of plant cell growth.
The artificial cells were created by putting droplets of glue in tannic acid; these grew under infusion of water.
Together with Gscheidlen, an assistant of Rudolf Heidenhain he was the first to demonstrate via animal experiments that the organism has the ability to eliminate putrefactive bacteria.
In evaluating the results, he distinguished chemical poisoning from infection with microorganisms on the one hand, and pathogenic from putrefactive bacteria on the other.
Traube developed a homogeneous concept of the critical significance of cellular respiration for the generation of heat, formation and maintenance of structures and organ function.
He thus demonstrated the role of water as active partner in slow oxidations and showed the intermediate character of hydrogen peroxide generation.
The University of Halle-Wittenberg conferred an honorary doctorate of medicine on Traube in 1867 and he was elected a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1886.
Louis Pasteur called Traube an excellent physiologist and professor; extensive appreciations were written by August Wilhelm von Hofmann, Hermann Emil Fischer and Ferdinand Cohn.
When the young Robert Koch in 1876 presented his discovery of bacillus anthracis as the specific cause of anthrax to the leading bacteriologist Ferdinand Cohn in Breslau, Traube, who had by then achieved academic recognition, was one of the few invited to witness this momentous event.
