Eduard Buchner

Eduard Buchner was born on 20 May 1860 in Munich, Bavaria, and died on 13 August 1917 near Focsani, Romania, of a wound suffered while serving as a field hospital surgeon during the First World War. He studied chemistry under Adolf von Baeyer, earned his doctorate at Munich in 1888, and held professorships at Kiel, Tubingen, the Agricultural University of Berlin, Breslau and Wurzburg. In 1897, grinding yeast cells with sand and kieselguhr and pressing out the resulting extract, he found that this cell-free "press juice" alone could ferment a sugar solution into alcohol and carbon dioxide, disproving Louis Pasteur's view that fermentation required a living cell's vital force. He named the responsible substance zymase, and his discovery of cell-free fermentation gave the first direct proof that a process credited to life itself was in fact carried out by extractable molecules, the founding demonstration of what came to be understood as an enzyme's action. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1907 for this discovery.