Karl Ritter von Frisch (20 November 1886 – 12 June 1982) was a German-Austrian ethologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, along with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz. His work centered on investigations of the sensory perceptions of the honey bee and he was one of the first to translate the meaning of the waggle dance. His theory, described in his 1927 book Aus dem Leben der Bienen (translated into English as The Dancing Bees), was disputed by other scientists and greeted with skepticism at the time. Only much later was it shown to be an accurate theoretical analysis.
Early life Karl Ritter von Frisch was the son of the surgeon and urologist Anton von Frisch, by his marriage to Marie Exner. Karl was the youngest of four sons, all of whom became university professors. Von Frisch was of partial Jewish heritage. Karl studied at the University of Vienna under Hans Leo Przibram and in Munich under Richard von Hertwig, initially in the field of medicine, but later turned to the natural sciences. He received his doctorate in 1910 and in the same year started work as an assistant in the zoology department of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
Career In 1912, he became a lecturer in zoology and comparative anatomy there; and in 1919 was promoted to a professorship. His research on honeybees was continued by his student Ingeborg Beling. In 1921 he went to Rostock University as a professor of zoology and director of an institute. In 1923 he accepted the offer of a chair at Breslau University, returning in 1925 to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where he became the head of the institute of zoology. Von Frisch attracted negative attention from the Nazi regime, among other things for employing Jewish assistants, including many women. Eventually Frisch was forced into retirement, but the decision was reversed because of his research on nosema infections in bees. In the original edition of his book "Du und das Leben" ("You and Life") he wrote in support of the Nazi Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring The institute of zoology was destroyed in the Second World War, and in 1946, Frisch went to work at the University of Graz, remaining there until 1950, when he returned to the reopened Munich institute. He retired in 1958 but continued his research.
Personal life Karl Ritter von Frisch married Margarete, née Mohr, who died in 1964. Their son, Otto Ritter von Frisch, was director of the Brunswick natural history museum between 1977 and 1995.
Research Frisch studied aspects of animal behaviour, including animal navigation, in the Carniolan honey bee (Apis mellifera carnica), a subspecies of the European honey bee.
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