30 Facts About Michael Heidelberger

Michael Heidelberger was an American immunologist, often regarded as the father of modern immunology.

Michael Heidelberger spent most his early career at Columbia University and comparable time in his later years on the faculty of New York University.

Michael Heidelberger's papers are held at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.

Michael Heidelberger's paternal grandfather, named Michael, was a German Jew who had emigrated to the United States in the early 1840s.

Michael Heidelberger's father had only an elementary school education, and was on the road for six months out of the year selling window curtains.

Michael Heidelberger had attended a private girls' school in Norfolk, Virginia, and after graduation had stayed with relatives in Germany for a year.

Until Michael Heidelberger was twelve, she taught him and his younger brother at home.

Michael Heidelberger decided at age eight that he wanted to be a chemist, for reasons he could never quite articulate or recall, but which he later judged no more than a "pigheaded idea".

Michael Heidelberger experimented at home by mixing medicines and the very basic ingredients included in children's chemistry sets of the time, until he began his formal training in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry at the Ethical Culture School, a private high school on New York's Upper West Side founded by the Ethical Culture Society, a Humanist religious movement of which his parents were members.

Michael Heidelberger maintained a connection with the school throughout his life, inviting student groups to visit his laboratory every year.

Michael Heidelberger loved music and started playing the clarinet in the high school orchestra.

Michael Heidelberger was talented enough that concert musicians encouraged him to consider a professional career in music.

When Michael Heidelberger entered Columbia University in 1905, his family moved to the Upper West Side so that he could live nearer to the school.

Michael Heidelberger resided there for the rest of his long life.

Michael Heidelberger received all of his academic degrees from Columbia, culminating with a Ph.

Levene, Donald D Van Slyke, and Walter A Jacobs, whom Heidelberger found assembled over tea.

Michael Heidelberger took their advice and in 1911 went to Zurich to work for a year in the laboratory of the organic chemist and future Nobel Laureate Richard Willstatter at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule.

Willstatter helped his somewhat impecunious American student by sharing the cost of laboratory supplies with him, arranging that when expensive materials, such as silver nitrate, were to be bought, it was his turn to pay, while Michael Heidelberger took turns buying cheaper materials like sulfuric acid.

Michael Heidelberger passed muster, and in September 1912 began working in Walter Abraham Jacobs' laboratory on a derivative of hexamethylene tetramine, a complex that seemed to prolong the life of monkeys suffering from polio, and that Flexner hoped could be adapted for use in humans.

Michael Heidelberger was a writer and activist for the New York chapter of the League of Women Voters and, during the 1940s, for the American Association for the United Nations.

Michael Heidelberger met his second wife Charlotte Rosen at a concert.

Michael Heidelberger was the violist in a Mozart trio in which Heidelberger performed.

Michael Heidelberger continued to work with Jacobs, a collaboration that lasted more than nine years and produced 44 papers.

In 1921 Heidelberger transferred to the laboratory of Donald D Van Slyke at the Rockefeller hospital, where he spent the next two years developing a method for preparing large quantities of purified oxyhemoglobin, with its oxygen-carrying capacity intact, for Van Slyke's studies of the uptake and release of oxygen in the blood.

When Karl Landsteiner, the famous Austrian immunologist and discoverer of human blood groups, arrived at the institute in 1922, Michael Heidelberger embarked with him on studies of the antigenic properties of different types of hemoglobin.

Michael Heidelberger devoted the rest of his career largely to pursuing the consequences of his and Avery's seminal discovery.

Michael Heidelberger was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the New York Academy of Medicine, as well as an officer of the Legion d'honneur of France.

Michael Heidelberger served twice as president of the American Association of Immunologists, in 1947 and 1949.

Michael Heidelberger was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Michael Heidelberger published a scientific paper in every decade of the 20th century.