He worked as a biochemical researcher in Vienna before being forced by the Anschluss to become a refugee,[1] first in France and then in the US, where he joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1943.

This account of Dische's life before he moved to the USA is based on the Memorial Book for the Victims of National Socialism at the University of Vienna in 1938.

From 1924 he researched on intermediary metabolism of blood cells at the University of Vienna, and developed simple methods for determining the amount of sugars present in tissues, such as his diphenylamine assay, the Dische test, which is used to distinguish DNA from RNA.

[7] As a consequence his paper passed almost unnoticed,[8] though it was discussed favourably by Earl Stadtman, one of the most prominent biochemists of the US in the post-war years:[9] Others, including Georges Cohen[10] and Jacques Monod and colleagues,[11] made similar assessments of Dische's contribution.

Nonetheless, despite these positive assessments by leading biochemists of the time, the discovery of feedback regulation is almost always attributed to two much more recent reports.