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Politics and physiology: Hermann Rein and the Nobel Prize 1933–1953

2014; Wiley; Volume: 592; Issue: 14 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1113/jphysiol.2014.273847

1469-7793

Nils Hansson, Serge Daan,

Philosophy and History of Science

The actual losses can now be estimated with fair accuracy. The number of teachers known to have been displaced from the universities and seats of higher learning [in Germany] is 1,684; that is about fifteen per cent of the scholars of Germany. […] No institution has suffered more than the University of Göttingen by the loss of distinguished members of its staff. […] On June 30, visitors to Göttingen will celebrate a unique series of losses of learning, liberty and life. (Anonymous, 1937, p. 703). [T]here still remain in Göttingen men of considerable distinction (to mention only four outstanding names: [Arnold] Eucken, physical chemist; [Adolf] Windaus, organic chemist and Nobel prizeman; [Ludwig] Prandtl, hydrodynamics; [Hermann] Rein, physiologist), who are continuing in the face of difficulties to maintain a high standard of scientific research and teaching. (Lambert, 1937, p. 930) One year before this debate, German scientists and politicians started a campaign against Nature, which succeeded in banning the journal from German libraries (Hossfeld & Olsson, 2006). They claimed that Nature had criticized National Socialist Germany. However, that action was only one brick in a comprehensive strategy by the German government to isolate German science. On 30 January 1937, Adolf Hitler prohibited all German citizens from accepting a Nobel Prize. This was in reaction to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935 to the pacifist and concentration camp inmate Carl von Ossietzky (Crawford, 2000). However, apparently, it was still possible to propose candidates who worked in Germany for the Nobel Prize. For example, the German physiologist Albrecht Bethe nominated the physiologist Erich von Holst in 1938. Bethe knew about Hitler's prohibition, but he tried to construct a solution. The nomination reads: ‘Although Holst is assistant at the Zoological Institute in Göttingen, and he is to my knowledge not a German citizen [Holst was born in Riga and he had studied in Danzig]. So, if he should be chosen, he may accept the Nobel Prize. It is of no doubt that he is one of the most talented and successful physiologists of the younger generation’ [Nobel Archive (NA); Bethe nomination von Holst, 1938]. Did the blacklisting of the Nobel Prize have direct effects on Hermann Rein's chances to be awarded a Nobel Prize? In recent years, the Nobel Prize has gained scholarly attention among medical historians (for example Crawford, 2000; Norrby, 2010; Hansson & Schagen, 2014). The NA for Physiology or Medicine holds correspondence, reports and nominations of senior and junior physicians from around the world. One should bear in mind that the number of Nobel Prize nominations of a researcher does not really reflect his or her importance, but it might give a hint of his or her reputation, given that the number is high and that the nominators are internationally spread. The relatively high number for Rein (12) is not exceptional if one takes the nomination number of internationally renowned Nobel Prize laureates such as Charles Scott Sherrington into account who was nominated 134 times (Bartholomew, 2010, p. 32). Hermann Rein was particularly interested in the body's responses to changing environmental conditions. In his time, the common approach to understanding the physiology of organs was to isolate them from the body and observe their responses to environmental changes, such as in temperature and pressure, while kept alive outside the animal. Rein was convinced that the physiology of the body and its responses could not be reconstructed from the measurements on isolated organs. In his view, processes such as blood circulation and metabolism had to be quantified in the intact organism. Rein, trained as a medical doctor, combined his knowledge of human physiology in health and disease with an interest in physics and chemistry to design innovative measurement techniques that could be applied in the intact organism. An important technique was the ‘Thermostromuhr’, a method to measure blood flow without opening the vessels, originally published in 1928 (Rein, 1928). It was based on local heating of a blood vessel by diathermy and recording the temperature difference between the blood upstream and downstream from the heating point. It allowed also the simultaneous determination of blood flow at different places in the circulation without opening any vessel. Rein applied the technique to a series of physiological questions focused on blood circulation, and achieved important results. He found that the liver functions as a blood depot, secondary only to the spleen (Grab et al. 1929). In humans the liver even exceeds the spleen in this role. Furthermore, he studied the regulation of coronary blood flow and found that it is not solely determined by a passive response to pressure, but in addition by local vasomotor control (Rein, 1931). Rein's lab observed that blood flow through the kidney remains regulated at a constant velocity when arterial blood pressure is increased (Hartmann et al. 1937). These are merely examples of the variety of novel insights in circulation yielded by his method. The accuracy of the Thermostromuhr was debated in the 1950s, but after some amendments concerning heat transfer through the vessel wall and the pulsatile nature of blood flow, the technique was considered useful, and the main conclusions drawn by Rein on the basis of his measurements were acknowledged (Janssen et al. 1957). By now the method is obsolete, as modern techniques for blood flow measurements such as laser Doppler velocimetry have become state of the art. To me, there is no doubt that only Professor Dr. Hermann Rein […] can be considered for this prestigeful award. He is known for two ingenious inventions […]. If these inventions really can do what Professor Dr. Rein suggests, it is no doubt that they are of the highest scientific and practical value. […] (NA; Schottmüller, 1936; see table 1) The nominators succeeded in getting the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine interested in both. It chose to evaluate Hermann Rein in three reports, written in 1933, 1936 and 1952. The first two reports were written by the pharmacologist Göran Liljestrand, the Secretary of the Nobel Committee from 1918 to 1960. Liljestrand noted that he appreciated Rein's research, but that he was not willing to give him a full recommendation for the Prize. In the concluding remark of his report on 14 July 1936, Liljestrand put Rein on a wait-and-see-list by saying: ‘In my opinion, Rein is a researcher of the future […] His work will surely get a new evaluation soon’ (NA; Liljestrand, 1936). In 1951, Rein was nominated by the famous surgeon Ludolph Brauer, who had himself been nominated earlier for his studies on open thorax surgery (Hansson & Schagen, 2014). In his nomination, Brauer stressed Rein's studies on the regulation of blood circulation and the influence of the liver on the heart. One year later, the physiologist Ulf S. von Euler (who later became the Nobel Prize laureate for Physiology or Medicine in 1970), was chosen as reviewer. Euler was far more critical than Liljestrand had been in the 1930s. In his 13 page report in 1952, Euler wrote that Rein's two main achievements had not been sufficiently verified, and that their significance was very unclear (NA; Euler, 1952). That was the last opinion of the Nobel Committee concerning Rein, who died 1 year later, in 1953. What good is it to get insured in a dinner speech that you look at me as the ‘leader’ of European physiology […]? What good is it if you celebrate me and say that I would be a Nobel laureate under different political constellations? (Rein, 1943, family archive) Hermann Rein's political views have not yet been thoroughly examined by historians. His pacifistic ideas are transparent throughout in his wartime diary. Rein and his five collaborators were able to carry on fundamental physiological research in his institute in Göttingen throughout the Second World War, despite the fact that he was not a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). The State Aviation Ministry had given him special status as a professor in human aviation physiology to train students in this area of medicine. This probably allowed him a privileged situation. In the memoirs of the contemporary Swedish physiologist Georg Kahlson (1901–1982), it is briefly stated that ‘Rein was no Nazi’ (Kahlson, 1981, p. 27), but somehow politically ‘untouchable’. Kahlson's view is interesting, as he had worked under Rein for a couple of months in Göttingen in 1934 and 1936, and he was one of few Swedish professors who strongly and unreservedly criticized both Adolf Hitler as well as National Socialism in numerous publications and speeches before, during and after the Second World War. Although he never received the Nobel Prize, Rein's international reputation remained sound in the immediate postwar years. For example, the physiologist and Nobel Prize laureate Sir Henry Dale argued, that the key persons to build up German science after 1945 should include the pharmacologist Wolfgang Heubner, the physicist Max Planck, the chemist Otto Hahn, and Hermann Rein (Schleiermacher & Schagen, 2008). In 1946, Rein became Rector of the Georg-August University in Göttingen, and then played a major role in the foundation of both the Max Planck Society (1946) and the Deutsche Forschungsrat, the precursor of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (1949). In 1952 he was appointed head of the Physiology Institute within the Max Planck institute for medical research in Heidelberg. He died on 14 May 1953. The biography of Hermann Rein shows that at least some German physiologists were not as isolated from the international science arena as it has been assumed, in spite of the fact that politicians in National Socialist Germany actively built walls around German researchers by blacklisting renowned international institutions. Hermann Rein (1898–1953) was one of the most renowned German physiologists from 1933 to 1953. During this period, he was nominated 12 times for the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Drawing on documents from the Archive of the Nobel Assembly for Physiology or Medicine in Stockholm, an article series in Nature and Rein's private diary, this overview reconstructs and discusses Rein's reputation in the scientific community and his most important scientific innovations: the ‘Thermostromuhr’ and the ‘Gaswechselschreiber’, and the insights obtained with them. It suggests that at least some outstanding scientists in the ‘Third Reich’ were not as isolated from the international science arena as has been assumed, in spite of the fact that the National Socialist government prohibited Nature in German libraries and German scholars to accept the Nobel Prize. The authors have no conflict of interests. None. We thank Dr Hans Rein for copies of the Hermann Rein diary, the two reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper and the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, Medicinska Nobelinstitutet, Nobels Väg 1, Solna, Sweden, for giving access to files on Hermann Rein.