Michael Heidelberger (April 29, 1888 – June 25, 1991) was an American immunologist, often regarded as the father of modern immunology. He and Oswald Avery showed that the polysaccharides of pneumococcus are antigens, enabling him to show that antibodies are proteins. He spent most his early career at Columbia University and comparable time in his later years on the faculty of New York University. In 1934 and 1936 he received the Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1967 he received the National Medal of Science, and then he earned the Lasker Award for basic medical research in 1953 and again in 1978. His papers are held at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.
Early life Heidelberger was born in 1888 in New York City to a Jewish couple, David and Fannie Campe Heidelberger, a traveling salesman and a homemaker respectively. An older brother had died shortly after birth; a younger brother, Charles, was born 21 months after Michael. His paternal grandfather, also named Michael, was a German Jew who had emigrated to the United States in the early 1840s. Heidelberger's father had only an elementary school education, and was on the road for six months out of the year selling window curtains. It fell to Heidelberger's mother to take charge of the household and of Michael's education. She had attended a private girls' school in Norfolk, Virginia, and after graduation had stayed with relatives in Germany for a year. Until Michael was twelve, she taught him and his younger brother at home. They attended classical concerts, had to speak German at the table, and were taught French by a nanny during outings to nearby Central Park. Later in life he came to appreciate his early training in languages that were central to scientific discourse during the first half of the twentieth century. 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". He 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. He maintained a connection with the school throughout his life, inviting student groups to visit his laboratory every year. Heidelberger loved music and started playing the clarinet in the high school orchestra, stating "Ich bin ein Heidelberger!" (I am a Heidelberger!) was talented enough that concert musicians encouraged him to consider a professional career in music. Instead, it became his "chief relaxation." He played the same two handmade wood instruments, a B flat and an A clarinet, all of his life, taking them with him wherever he went to join in chamber music performances at conferences or at the homes of friends.
Education and early research career When Heidelberger entered Columbia University in 1905, his family moved to the Upper West Side so that he could live nearer to the school. He resided there for the rest of his long life. He received all of his academic degrees from Columbia, culminating with a Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1911. His dissertation dealt with quinazoline analogs, alkaloids that his adviser, Marston Taylor Bogert, hoped—wrongly, as Heidelberger proved—would produce useful dyes when combined with phthalic acid. As a student he supported himself by selling Virginia hams to hotels and wholesale grocers around the city on Friday afternoons, earning up to $50 per week, and by teaching analytical chemistry under Irving Langmuir at Stevens Institute in Hoboken, New Jersey. Urged on by his parents, Heidelberger after graduation with his Ph.D. arranged for a visit with his former family physician, Samuel J. Meltzer, who had seen him through typhoid fever as a young child and who had since become the first chair of the Department of Physiology at the newly founded Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research. Meltzer curtly advised Heidelberger that he ought not to go into science, because "science is no profession for a poor man's son." Heidelberger quickly realized that Meltzer was testing his commitment to science, and he insisted that he wanted to become a chemist. Meltzer relented, and sent him on to meet with the institute's chemists, Phoebus A. T. Levene, Donald D. Van Slyke, and Walter A. Jacobs, whom Heidelberger found assembled over tea. They advised him to go to Europe for postdoctoral training, then a requirement for any scientist who wanted to find a position at a leading research university in the United States. Heidelberger took their advice and in 1911 went to Zürich to work for a year in the laboratory of the organic chemist and future Nobel Laureate Richard Willstätter at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule. There he perfected the synthesis of cyclooctatetraene, an important intermediate in organic research. Willstätter 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 Heidelberger took turns buying cheaper materials like sulfuric acid. "Better training than that you couldn't have," Heidelberger summed up his experience with Willstätter. They remained friends for three decades, through Willstätter's flight from Germany in 1938 and until his death in Switzerland in 1942. While visiting relatives in Germany on his return from Zürich, Heidelberger received a telegram from his father relating an offer of a position of Fellow of the Rockefeller Institute, conditional upon a personal interview and approval by the institute's director, Simon Flexner.
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