Gerrit Friedrich Otto Toennies

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Gerrit Friedrich Otto Toennies (January 31, 1898 in Hamburg, Germany – September 16, 1978 in Kensington, Prince Edward Island, Canada) was a research biochemist. He was the oldest of five children of the famous sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies and a brother of Jan Friedrich Tönnies.

Hamburg City in Germany

Hamburg is the second-largest city in Germany with a population of over 1.8 million.

Germany Federal parliamentary republic in central-western Europe

Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central and Western Europe, lying between the Baltic and North Seas to the north, and the Alps to the south. It borders Denmark to the north, Poland and the Czech Republic to the east, Austria and Switzerland to the south, France to the southwest, and Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands to the west.

Prince Edward Island Province of Canada

Prince Edward Island is a province of Canada consisting of the Atlantic island of the same name along with several much smaller islands nearby. PEI is one of the three Maritime Provinces. It is the smallest province of Canada in both land area and population, but it is the most densely populated. Part of the traditional lands of the Mi'kmaq, it became a British colony in the 1700s and was federated into Canada as a province in 1873. Its capital is Charlottetown. According to the 2016 census, the province of PEI has 142,907 residents.

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Life

Toennies grew up in Eutin, Germany. He was drafted into the German army in 1916 and shortly after was taken prisoner of war. As a French prisoner 1916 – 1920 he was assigned to a gas works in Le Havre, France, where he became interested in chemistry. 1920 – 1924 he studied at Universities in Freiburg (1920), Munich (1921 – 1922) and Kiel (1922 – 1924), where in 1925 he received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry. His adviser was Otto Diels who together with Kurt Alder, received the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1950. Toennies emigrated to the U.S. in 1926 where he joined the Texas Oil Company in Bayonne, New Jersey until 1929. Then he became a staff member of the Philadelphia Lankenau Hospital Research Institute (LHRI), which later was called the Institute for Cancer Research. The LHRI was founded by Stanley P. Reimann and Frederick Hammett in 1927 as one of the first U.S. laboratories devoted to fundamental cancer research. The present day Fox Chase Cancer Center stems from the LHRI. Toennies was head of the Department of Microbiology 1947 –1963. At retirement he was awarded the honorary position “Senior Member Emeritus” by their board of trustees. Subsequently, he became research professor at Temple University School of Medicine (1963 – 1968) and finally a visiting professor at the University of Göttingen and the “Biologische Bundesanstalt für Land- und Forstwirtschaft” in Braunschweig. Toennies was married to Dita Margarete Jebens (1903 – 1959) and Dorothy West (1903 – 2004). He is survived by Jan Peter Toennies (1930 - ) and Ralf Gerrit Toennies (1939 - ). Before his death he requested that his gravestone should have the words "Still Learning" placed on it. His wish was fulfilled by his sons.

Eutin Place in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany

Eutin is the district capital of Eastern Holstein county located in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein. As of 2015, the town had some 17,000 inhabitants.

Le Havre Subprefecture and commune in Normandy, France

Le Havre, is an urban French commune and city in the Seine-Maritime department in the Normandy region of northwestern France. It is situated on the right bank of the estuary of the river Seine on the Channel southwest of the Pays de Caux.

France Republic with mainland in Europe and numerous oversea territories

France, officially the French Republic, is a country whose territory consists of metropolitan France in Western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The metropolitan area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. It is bordered by Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany to the northeast, Switzerland and Italy to the east, and Andorra and Spain to the south. The overseas territories include French Guiana in South America and several islands in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. The country's 18 integral regions span a combined area of 643,801 square kilometres (248,573 sq mi) and a total population of 67.3 million. France, a sovereign state, is a unitary semi-presidential republic with its capital in Paris, the country's largest city and main cultural and commercial centre. Other major urban areas include Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lille and Nice.

Research

In 1940 Toennies was the first to point out the probable biological importance of sulfonium compounds – a prediction later borne out by a variety of findings by other investigators. Later, he was the first to demonstrate that the red blood cells are a major site of bound forms of folic acids, a group of vitamins that play an important role in rapid growth of tissues such as occurs in cancer. He also made pioneering contributions to our understanding of the role of various chemicals on bacterial growth.

Over the years Toennies developed chemical procedures so precise and useful that many of them have become standards. One of them – a method of oxidizing proteins with performic acid, was adopted by the British chemist, Frederick Sanger, in his research to determine the molecular structure of insulin that won Sanger the Nobel prize in 1958.

Frederick Sanger British biochemist

Frederick Sanger was a British biochemist who twice won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, one of only two people to have done so in the same category, the fourth person overall with two Nobel Prizes, and the third person overall with two Nobel Prizes in the sciences. In 1958, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his work on the structure of proteins, especially that of insulin". In 1980, Walter Gilbert and Sanger shared half of the chemistry prize "for their contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids". The other half was awarded to Paul Berg "for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant DNA".

Publications

Gerrit Toennies is the author of 114 scientific publications; those most highly cited include:

Toennies has also published a critical essay on the problems of modern society:

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U.S. Patents

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References

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