Realizing that science would be a worthwhile way for him to accomplish his life's work, he entered Johns Hopkins University where he was awarded a B.S.
After graduation, Seifriz went to Geneva, Switzerland to study cell physiology with Robert Hippolyte Chodat.
Then Seifriz joined Herbert Freundlich at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute to learn the techniques he would need to understand the physical properties of protoplasm.
[3] In 1932 when he was head of the University of Pennsylvania botanical laboratories, he led an expedition to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains in Colombia to collect and study flora there.
[4] Seifriz held 'Philosophical Meetings' at his home Seifriziana to which he invited artists, musicians, scientists, medical doctors, psychologists, and other intellectuals.
[1] Seifriz was a naturalist and a laboratory scientist who studied the viscoelastic properties and microscopic structure of protoplasm.
[9] Seifriz proposed that the physical properties of protoplasm were a consequence of long chain molecules attached to one another like a brush heap.
This gifted young man had done postgraduate work in botany at Tokyo's Imperial University, was studying at Giessen in Germany in the fateful summer of 1939.
[11] In his lectures in Physics and Chemistry of Protoplasm, Seifriz gave not only the facts, but the background of the subject and the lines of thought by which the discoveries have come about.