Moritz Traube - Accolades and Appreciations

Accolades and Appreciations

In consistently applying chemistry to physiology, Traube was a follower of Liebig and peer of Hoppe-Seyler. Traube produced 51 publications, lectured and occasionally taught. His significant pupils were Guido Bodländer and his own son Wilhelm Traube. His biochemical concepts influenced later research. In his time he was especially noted for his clarification of the role of nutrients in metabolism and his work with semipermeable membranes. The University of Halle-Wittenberg conferred an honorary doctorate of medicine on Traube in 1867 and he was elected a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1886. Louis Pasteur called Traube an excellent physiologist and professor; extensive appreciations were written by August Wilhelm von Hofmann, Hermann Emil Fischer and Ferdinand Cohn. In 1875 Charles Darwin had asked Traube to send him his work on cell formation. Philosophers, too, showed great interest in his results. In the 1870s Karl Marx met Traube in Karlsbad to learn more about inorganic cells because Friedrich Engels was working on the relation between organic and inorganic nature, i.e., the dialectics of nature in Anti-Dühring, and Traube's artificial cells served as models of living plant cells. When the young Robert Koch in 1876 presented his discovery of bacillus anthracis as the specific cause of anthrax to the leading bacteriologist Ferdinand Cohn in Breslau, Traube, who had by then achieved academic recognition, was one of the few invited to witness this momentous event.