Jacques Loeb

Jacques Loeb (born April 7, 1859, in Mayen, Rhineland-Palatinate; died February 11, 1924, in Hamilton, Bermuda) was a German-born American physiologist and biologist.

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Biography

Loeb was educated at the universities of Berlin, Munich, and Strasburg (M.D. 1884). He took postgraduate courses at the universities of Strasburg and Berlin, and in 1886 became assistant at the physiological institute of the University of Würzburg, remaining there till 1888. In a similar capacity, he then went to Strasburg University. During his vacations he pursued biological researches, at Kiel in 1888, and at Naples in 1889 and 1890.

In 1892 he was called to the University of Chicago as assistant professor of physiology and experimental biology, becoming associate professor in 1895, and professor of physiology in 1899. In 1902 he was called to fill a similar chair at the University of California.

In 1910 Loeb moved to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, where he headed a department created for him. He remained at Rockefeller (now Rockefeller University) until his death. Throughout most of these years Loeb spent his summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, performing experiments on various marine invertebrates. It was there that Jacques Loeb performed his most famous experiment, on artificial parthenogenesis. Loeb was able to cause the eggs of sea urchins to begin embryonic development without sperm. This was achieved by slight chemical modifications of the water in which the eggs were kept, which served as the stimulus for the development to begin.

Loeb became one of the most famous scientists in America, widely covered in newspapers and magazines. He was the model for the character of Max Gottlieb in Sinclair Lewis's Pulitzer-winning novel Arrowsmith, the first great work of fiction to idealize and idolize pure science.^[1]

Loeb was nominated many times for the Nobel Prize but never won.

Research area

The main subjects of Loeb's work were:

• Animal tropisms and their relation to the instincts of animals
• Heteromorphosis, the replacement of an injured or removed organ by a different organ
• Toxic and antitoxic effects of ions
• Artificial parthenogenesis
• Hybridization of the eggs of sea-urchins by the sperm of starfish

Works

Among Loeb's works the following may be mentioned:

• Der Heliotropismus der Thiere und seine Uebereinstimmung mit dem Heliotropismus der Pflanzen, Würzburg: Verlag von Georg Hertz, 1890.
• Untersuchungen zur physiologischen Morphologie der Thiere, Würzburg: Verlag von Georg Hertz, 1891–1892. 2 vols., vol. 1: Ueber Heteromorphose, vol. 2: Organbildung und Wachsthum.
• Einleitung in die vergleichende Gehirnphysiologie und vergleichende Psychologie, Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1899. English ed., Comparative physiology of the brain and comparative psychology, New York: Putnam, 1900.
• Studies in general physiology, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1905.
• The dynamics of living matter, New York: Columbia University Press, 1906.
• The mechanistic conception of life: biological essays, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1912; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964.
• Artificial parthenogenesis and fertilization, tr. from German by W. O. Redman King, rev. and ed. by Loeb. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1913.
• The organism as a whole, from a physicochemical viewpoint, New York: Putnam, 1916.
• Forced movements, tropisms, and animal conduct, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1918.
• Proteins and the theory of colloidal behavior, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1922.

The Mechanistic Conception of Life is Loeb's most famous and influential work. It contains English translations of some of his previous publications in German.

References

1. ^ The novel Arrowsmith, Paul de Kruif (1890-1971) and Jacques Loeb (1859–1924): a literary portrait of "medical science", H. M. Fangerau, Medical Humanities 32 (2006), pp. 82–87.

This article incorporates text from the 1901–1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, a publication now in the public domain.