Life, Luck, and Logic in Biochemical Research

UFE, LUCK, AND LOGIC IN BIOCHEMICAL RESEARCH* FEODOR LYNEN] The invitation to present the first Mason Lecture, sponsored by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, is a signal honor, and I should like to express my deep gratitude for the opportunity. A Mason Lecture offers both an occasion and a stimulus to look back on one's own career and to place one's experimental work into the framework ofmodern biochemistry . Doing this, I realized the importance ofthe surroundings in which I grew up and which eventually led me into science. I also realized that frequendy,just by accident, personal life and scientific work are directed. This is very true in my case. My father's and mother's families lived for many generations in the Rhine area, not too far away from Holland and Belgium. Our family name, Lynen, very unusual in Germany, probably originated in these countries. I would certainly have become a Rhinelander ifmy father had not chosen engineering as a profession and accepted an offer to the Technische Hochschule in Munich. I was born there in Schwabing, which is, with its artistic atmosphere, the Greenwich Village ofMunich. I was the sixth child, and two more were to be born after me. The fact that I grew up in Munich and in Bavaria with its mountains nearby and its pleasant social life is responsible for the steadfastness with which I stayed in this place. As a little boy, I got in touch with chemistry through my brother Walter, twelve years older than I, who wanted to become a chemist and for that reason had installed a small chemical laboratory in the attic of * The first Verne R. Mason Memorial Lecture, University of Miami, February, 1968. Permission to publish has been granted by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. t Director, Max-Planck Institut für Zellchemie, Munich, Germany. 204 Feodor Lynen · Life in Biochemical Research Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Winter 196g our house. He chose me as his assistant, and I, ofcourse, was very proud to be allowed around him in this adventurous enterprise. Walter was killed in World War I. Many years later, when I had chemistry as a subject in high school, I was attracted by the experiments performed by the teacher, Dr. Wolf. I tried to repeat them in the laboratory still existing in our house, but was not always very successful. One explosion ruined my best suit and hurt my face, and thus extinguished my passion for chemistry as well as my mother's sympathetic feeling toward my activity. When I finished high school in 1930 with the German "Abitur," I had no definite ideas about my future profession. It could have been either medicine or chemistry. Only the shorter line at the registration desk of the Department of Chemistry determined me to choose the chemical subject. The Munich Chemical Institute was famous for its tradition. Following Justus von Liebig, its high reputation was built up by Adolf von Baeyer, Richard Willstätter, and Heinrich Wieland, all ofthem Nobel Prize winners. In contrast to many other chemical institutes in Germany, all ofthese famous organic chemists were already interested in biochemistry . The lectures ofHeinrich Wieland, who was head ofthe Institute at my time, had already introduced the students to biochemical problems. Thus the ground was prepared. Two events which were to be ofutmost importance to my future life occurred within one year. OnJanuary 30, 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany, and I think it is unnecessary to elaborate on the consequences of this. On the same day exactly one year before, I was ski racing in Kitzbühel, Austria, and hoped to win the "Silberne Gams" (silver mountain goat). I did not win it, but I broke my leg and had to stay in the hospital for nearly one year. Although this accident was extremely sad for me at the time, because it stopped my career as a ski racer and made me lose one year in my studies, it turned out to be quite fortunate later. It saved me from any service in the Nazi organizations like the SA, escape from which was nearly impossible for a student at that time. Besides that...