The Rum Biography Title
The Rum Biography Introduction
Featured Biography: Eduard Alois Buchner
Early Life
Eduard Alois Buchner was born on May 20th, 1860 in
Eduard Alois Buchner
Munich, Germany into a prosperous family. His father was Ernst Buchner, a physician and professor of forensic medicine at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University. His mother was Frederike Martin, the daughter of a treasurer to the royal court.
Aged 18, Eduard Buchner completed as pell in the Army in 1878, and also began working very hard to become scientifically knowledgeable. He studied and worked in a number of fields simultaneously.
He studied science at the Ludwig Maximilian University from 1877- 1883, while also working as an intern for the eminent chemist Emil Erlenmeyer at Munich’s Technical University from 1878-1881. Moreover, he worked in a jam-making and canning business, and also studied fungi and the influence of oxygen on fermentation processes at the Carl Wilhelm von Nägeli botanical institute from 1882-1884 under the direction of his brother hans.
Buchner’s Scientific Pursuit
In 1884, Buchner began postgraduate chemistry work directed by the future Nobel Prize winner Adolf von Baeyer. In 1885, he published his first paper on fermentation: The influence of oxygen on fermentations.
Buchner was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Munich in 1888. In 1891, his thesis on synthesis of pyrazole, pyrazoline and trimethylene derivatives and a lecture on The Chemical Processes in Fermentation allowed him to qualify as a lecturer. In fact, Buchner was the first person to synthesize pyrazole. In 1893, Buchner became a lecturer at the University of Kiel.
In 1896, at the age of 36, Buchner became extraordinary professor for Analytical and Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Tübingen. There he began the work on alcoholic fermentation without yeast cells, for which he is most famous today.
Path to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
In 1898, he was appointed to the chair of chemistry at the Agricultural College of Berlin. He
Die Zymasegärung
also directed the institute for fermentation, continuing his cell-free fermentation studies.
In 1903, Buchner summarized his discoveries in the book Die Zymasegärung written with coauthors Martin Hahn and his brother Hans Buchner.
Buchner demonstrated that chemicals extracted from dead yeast, containing no living cells, could convert sugar to alcohol. He called this extract “yeast-juice” and his book meticulously detailed the experiments involving it.
According to Buchner’s findings, the fermentation process did not require life! Instead it required the activity of chemicals called enzymes. This was a very important discovery because it established that biochemical reactions are possible outside living cells. Up until this point, it was believed that the yeast cells themselves were responsible for the transformation of fermentable sugars into alcohol.
Faced with a previous unknown Buchner name it zymase, a word derived from the Greek zumē which means to “leaven”.
In 1907, at the age of 47, Buchner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his “biochemical researches and his discovery of cell-free fermentation.”
During his Nobel lecture in 1907, Buchner stated that:
“The active agent in the expressed yeast juice appears rather to be a chemical substance, an enzyme, which I have called zymase. From now on, one can experiment with this just as with other chemicals.”
“We are seeing the cells of plants and animals more and more clearly as chemical factories, where the various products are manufactured in separate workshops. The enzymes act as the overseers.”
Late Life
In August 1900, at the age of 40, Buchner married Lotte Stahl, the 24-year-old daughter of a Tübingen professor. The couple had four children: Friedel, Hans, Rudolf and Luise. World War 1 began in 1914, and by 1915 Buchner, aged 55, had become a major in a transport unit. In 1916, he was exempted from military duties and resumed his academic studies. When America entered the war in 1917, Buchner volunteered again to serve in the German army. On August 11, 1917, he was badly wounded while serving in Focsani, Romania.
Eduard Buchner died at the age of 57, on August 13, 1917 in Focsani, Romania from wounds received in military service and was buried at Focsani’s military cemetery. He was survived by his wife and his three oldest children.
Modern Views about Zymase
Despite being groundbreaking at the time (enough to win Buchner a Nobel Prize), the discovery of zymase quickly became obsolete, as science better understood the role of enzymes in fermentation. Today we refer to this process by different names: TCA Cyle, Citric Acid Cycle or Krebs Cycle (read Fermentation Primer Part III - page 14). Zymase, originally thought to be a single enzyme, turned out to be a complex of eight different ones, all collaborating in the production of ethanol: Aconitase, Isocirate Dehydrogenase, a-ketoglutarate dehydrogenase, Succinyl-CoA synthetase, Succinic dehydrogenase, Fumarase, Malate dehydrogenase and Citrate syntase.
So, if science has identified all the enzymes needed to carry out fermentation, why are we still using yeast? The answer is that yeast remain the fastest, least expensive way to create the required enzymes! Through evolution, yeast varieties have developed and adapted their NDA to create the enzymes and to use them efficiently, in order to achieve their (and our) desired goal!
