Aug

13

I found this article about Gustav Born quite fascinating.

Gustav Born was a physician and pharmacologist who taught the world about blood clotting. In 1945, he was posted as a British army doctor in Hiroshima, and noticed that most of the survivors of the atomic bomb suffered from chronic bleeding. He demonstrated that exposure to radiation destroys the body's platelets to cause bleeding and laid the basics for treatment of bleeding and clotting disorders, some of which are still used today.

In a lifetime of research, he made major breakthroughs in histamine, stomach acid secretion, how involuntary muscles work, how adrenaline works and much more. He demonstrated how aspirin helps to prevent heart attacks and strokes, how high blood pressure can cause heart attacks, and how plaques break off, which causes clots to form resulting in heart attacks. He showed how white blood cells help to prevent infections.

Brilliant achievements often come from having outstanding genes and being exposed to brilliant people. The number of famous and brilliant people in Gustav Born's family is impressive and the creative genius of their close friends and colleagues is almost unbelievable.

Refugees from Nazi Germany, Gustav was the son of physicist Max Born, who received the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum mechanics and whose friends included two of the greatest physicists of all time, Werner Heisenberg and Albert Einstein. In 1933, when Gustav was 12 years old, Hitler came into power in Nazi Germany and his father lost his job as physics professor because he was Jewish. Gustav Born remembers his classmates refusing to play with him and hitting him because he was Jewish.

Albert Einstein told them to leave Germany immediately. These were horrible times, but some non-Jews showed great courage. Nobel prize winner Max von Laue, who was not Jewish, suffered greatly for supporting his Jewish colleagues. World famous and Nobel Prize winning physicist Max Planck went to see Hitler in person to ask him to let Jewish scientists keep their jobs, but Hitler "foamed at the mouth and wouldn't let him talk any more". Sixteen Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany went on to win Nobel prizes.

The Born family moved to Cambridge University in England, then to the University of Edinburgh where Max Born became professor of physics. Gustav was a brilliant student who could have studied anything, but his pacifist father encouraged him to go to the university's medical school so he could avoid having to kill anyone in the coming war with Germany. His grandfather was also a physician.

Stefanie Harvey writes: 

It would be 17 if Lise Meitner had not been excluded in 1944 (the prize for Chemistry went to Otto Hahn exclusively.)


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