Word: butenandt
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DIED. ADOLF BUTENANDT, 91, German scientist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his pioneering work on hormones; in Munich. Beginning in 1929, Butenandt isolated a number of previously unknown sex hormones, including progesterone, which maintains pregnancy. The knowledge of hormonal structure gained from this research made possible the development of the birth-control pill. A Nazi law forced Butenandt to decline his Nobel Prize, which he finally received in 1949. After the war, he helped rebuild Germany's scientific community as head of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry. DIED. THOMAS MAYNE, 93, Australian industrial chemist...
German Chemists Peter Karlson and Adolf Butenandt of the University of Munich collected three tons of silkworm pupae, ground up the little animals, then carefully processed the mess to extract 100 milligrams (one three-hundredth of an ounce) of a hormone called ecdysone. They knew ecdysone played a large part in the silkworm's life cycle, and when they discovered that it was remarkably similar to human sex hormones, they were fascinated. But what, if anything, did it have to do with DNA's genetic code...
...massive experiment conducted by Adolf Butenandt, 56, who was co-winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (for isolating the male sex hormone, androsterone), a research team at Munich's Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry imported 1,000,000 silkworm cocoons from Italy and Japan, opened them up with razor blades, separated the pupae of 310,000 females from the males. What followed, in the words of one researcher, was "a mass slaughter, and not for the fainthearted." Each tiny pupa was disemboweled, the scent glands carefully cut out. Male moths served as lab assistants: when they were...
Most moths are not pests in themselves, but their larvae are-e.g., the larvae of the gypsy moth destroy thousands of trees every year. Butenandt's discovery opens the way to a new attack on such pests. Insecticides kill off useful insects along with the pests. But if the sex attractant for one particular species can be isolated and synthesized, its males can be attracted, trapped, and killed without harming useful insects...
Since Adolf Hitler forbids Germans to accept Nobel Prizes, Domagk has already politely refused to take the prize money (TIME, Nov. 6). Kuhn and Butenandt will probably do the same, unless they want to perform the scientific experiment of living in a concentration camp...