Charlotte Auerbach - Early Science Education - Between Science Teaching and PhD

Between Science Teaching and PhD

Charlotte Auerbach may have been influenced by the scientists in her family: her father Friedrich Auerbach was a chemist, her uncle a physicist, and her grandfather the anatomist Leopold Auerbach. She studied Biology and Chemistry at the Universities of Würzburg, Freiburg and Berlin. She was taught and inspired by Karl Haider and Max Hartmann in Berlin, and later in Würzburg by Hans Kniep. After very good examinations in biology, chemistry, and physics, she initially decided to become a secondary-school teacher of science, passing the exams for that, with distinction in 1924. She taught in Heidelberg (1924-1925) and briefly at the University of Frankfurt, from which she was dismissed - probably because she was Jewish. In 1928 she started postgraduate research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology (Berlin-Dahlem) in Developmental Physiology under Otto Mangold. In 1929 she abandoned her work with Mangold: he would later join the Nazi party, and Auerbach found his dictatorial manner unpleasant. In reply to her suggestion to change direction of her project, he replied "You are my student, you do as I say. What you think is of no consequence!" (Kilbey 1995). She again taught biology in several schools in Berlin - until the Nazi party ended this by law since she was Jewish. Following her mother's advice, she left the country in 1933 and fled to Edinburgh in Scotland where she got her PhD in 1935 at the Institute of Animal Genetics in the University of Edinburgh. She would stay affiliated to this Institute throughout her whole career. After being an assistant instructor in animal genetics, she became a lecturer in 1947, Professor of Genetics in 1967 and Professor emeritus in 1969.