Background

Max Rubner was born on June 2, 1854, in Munich, Germany. Rubner was the son of Johann Nepomuk Rubner, a locksmith, and of Barbara Duscher.

Education

Rubner's scientific inclinations were already dominant in his Gymnasium years in Munich, and he methodically pursued his interests outside of school. At the age of fifteen, he had his own microscope and chemical apparatus. Rubner began studying medicine at the University of Munich in 1873 and completed the course in 1877.

When he received his doctorate in 1878, he already had several publications to his credit. While a medical student, he also worked in the chemical institute under Liebig’s successor Adolf Baeyer and Carl Voit, the director of the physiological institute.

Career

After he had completed his studies, Rubner joined Voit’s institute as an unpaid assistant. In his work on metabolism, he developed a novel approach to bioenergetics. Dissatisfied with the purely chemical material approach to nutritive substances and their effects, he investigated their energy values in the body. Voit did not agree with the direction his work was taking, and for a long time paid no attention to Rubner’s Habilitationsschrift. In the meantime, Rubner spent the academic year 1880–1881 in Carl Ludwig’s physiological institute at Leipzig. There, where he hoped his physicalist approach would be more appreciated, he studied the physiology of the circulation, the muscles, and digestion and undertook an investigation of the metabolism of the mammalian muscle artificially supplied with blood.

In 1883 Rubner qualified as a lecturer in physiology at Munich, where in the next two years lie conceived most of his novel views on energy maintenance, the validity of the law of the conservation of energy in the animal economy, the isodynamic relationship of nutrients, and the loss of energy through radiation and evaporation according to the law of surfaces. He later gradually deepened and demonstrated these views with extremely subtle methods and quantitative exactness.

In 1880 Rubner published his medical dissertation, über die Ausnutzung einiger Nahrungsmittel im Darmkanal des Menschen. Three years later he published “Die Vertretungswerthe der hauptsächlichsten organischen Nahrungsstoffe im Theirkörper.” Setting forth his “law of isodynamics,” which provided a method of calculating the quantity of each constituent (fats, proteins, starch) required to produce an equal amount of energy when consumed in the body. In 1885 he published the exact caloric values of nutritive substances.

In September 1885 Rubner was offered, on the same day, an assistant professorship in hygiene at Marburg and a chair in pharmacology at Munich. He chose Marburg, convinced that hygiene was simply applied physiology.

In the same year, an improvised institute of hygiene was created for him; in 1888 it was equipped with a lecture room and laboratories. Rubner remained at Marburg until the winter semester of 1891. While at Marburg he composed the works on heat regulation, body surface, and the exchange of substances that were published as “Biologische Gesetze” (1887).

In 1891 Rubner succeeded Robert Koch in the chair of hygiene in Berlin, with the explicit understanding that hygiene would be emphasized over bacteriology. A large new institute was built for him in 1905. Rubner moved to the chair of physiology on 1 April 1909, succeeding Engelmann. On 1 April 1913, he assumed additional duties as director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Arbeitsphysiologie, which he had been instrumental in creating. This organization undertook specialized research on industrial hygiene and industrial medicine.

Rubner published most of his works while at Berlin. They encompassed all aspects of the physiology of nutrition and metabolism, including the hygienic effects of clothing, climate, air and temperature, and the nutrition of entire populations. Among the most original results of his research in these years was his clarification of the specific dynamic effect of foodstuffs; begun between 1883 and 1885, this work was developed fully in Gesetze des Energieverbrauchs (1902). In 1894 Rubner definitively established the validity of the principle of the conservation of energy in living organisms - a goal toward which he and other physiologists had long been working. Between 1896 and 1903 lie clarified the influence of cold on metabolism and the roles of radiation, conduction, and evaporation in heat loss.

In 1892 Rubner had taken over the editing of the Archiv für Hygiene and Bakteriologie. He published many original articles in it, including those on the Eiweissminimum, the minimum daily protein intake that preserves a balance between nitrogen intake and nitrogen elimination, and on the attrition quota Abnutzungsquote, the amount of daily nitrogen loss through elimination without protein intake (1908).

In a very original way, Rubner sought to consider the lifespans of mammals in relation to their period of growth and the energy consumption of the protoplasm. When growth stops, the protoplasm can carry out only a constant magnitude of energy exchanges and ultimately loses even this capacity (1908). Lifespan is, therefore, a function of energy consumption.

During World War I Rubner became very active in the field of national nutrition. In 1910–1911 he was rector of the University of Berlin.

He investigated the shift in food consumption resulting from urbanization and other changes in German life (1913–1914). In 1918 Rubner studied in detail the disastrous effects on Germany’s civilian population of the blockade maintained by the Allies beyond the end of the war.

In his last years, Rubner related the results of his research in nutrition and metabolism to very general human problems. He spoke before the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin on world nutrition - past, present, and future (1928); on man’s struggle for life (1928); and on the “enemies of mankind”: malnutrition, disease, hunger, poor living conditions, and poor health care (1932).

Achievements

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  Rubner's achievements spanned a broad range of activities which included his study of medicine, his scientific specialization in physiology and, finally his activity as a professor at the Institute of Hygiene. Thus, he opened the door to interdisciplinary research that fully strived for the benefits of the population.
  
  Max Rubner dealt, amongst others, with the value of wheat bran for human consumption (shaped in his professorial dissertation), with the effects of humidity on different substances as well as with hygienic issues dealing with the construction and operation of hospitals, etc. The enormous number of 361 works Rubner wrote during his life, or in which he was involved, shows how serious he took the knowledge transfer.
  
  Also, Rubner was co-founder of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Arbeitsphysiologie, and became its director in 1913. His achievements led to his election to the scientific academies of Munich, Vienna, Oslo, Washington, D.C., Stockholm, and Uppsala.
  
  In addition to numerous honors and awards, which Max Rubner obtained during his life and post mortem, the Federal Republic of Germany thanks him now with a very special acknowledgment for his great scientific achievement, his outstanding commitment, and perseverance. In 2008, the Federal Research Centre of Nutrition and Food was reorganized and renamed Max Rubner-Institut (MRI).

Works

More photos

• book

  • Handbuch Der Hygiene

    (Volume 3)

    1914
  • Kraft und Stoff im Haushalt der Natur 1908
  • Ueber die Stellung der Physiologie im Universitätsunterricht 1908
  • Die Ernährungsphysiologie der Hefezelle bei alkoholischer Gärung 1913
  • Das Problem der Lebensdauer und seine Beziehungen zu Wachstum und Ernährung 1908
  • Die Ernährung des Menschen mit Besonderer Berücksichtigung der Ernährung bei Leibesübungen 1925
  • Ueber die Stellung der Physiologie im Universitätsunterricht. Vortrag Gehalten zur Eröffnung des Physiologischen Instituts 1909
  • Volksernährungsfragen 1908
  • Lehrbuch der Hygiene: vierte Auflage 1905
  • Nahrungsmittel Und Ernaehrungskunde 1908
  • The Laws of Energy Conservation in Nutrition 1909
  • Lehrbuch der Hygiene. Systematische Darstellung der Hygiene und ihrer wichtigsten Untersuchungs-methoden 1892
  • The Harvey Lectures: Delivered Under the Auspices of the Harvey Society of New York, 1912-1913 1913

Views

Quotations: "Not a day without an experiment."

"One should not despair when scientific results do not prevail immediately. It might take eight to ten years before something really new is recognized."

"One should not stick to a narrow field, but be most versatile - also under the methodical aspect."

Membership

Max Rubner was a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and of the National Academy of Sciences.

Personality

Rubner possessed a rough manner, notorious taciturnity, and a sarcastic sense of humor. As an investigator, he was scrupulously exact in his measurements and inventive in the construction of proper apparatus (a nutrient calorimeter and an animal calorimeter, among many others).

Connections

Father:

Johann Nepomuk Rubner

Mother:

Barbara Duscher

mentor:

Carl von Voit

31 October 1831 – 31 January 1908, he is considered by many to be the "father" of modern dietetics. As a chemist and physiologist, he found that the amount of nitrogen in excreted urea is a measure for the protein turnover. Using a respiration chamber, he could characterize the significance of individual nutrients, known as Voitsche Kostmaß.

A student in Munich, Rubner became early in his career interested in the problems of metabolism and naturally gravitated to the laboratory of Carl Voit, becoming, after having spent a year in Ludwig's laboratory, one of his assistants and eventually Privatdozent (1883).

Collegue :

Otto Heubner

With Otto Heubner, Rubner performed important studies involving energy metabolism in infancy.

mentor:

Adolf von Baeyer

References

• Farewell to the common cold: An exposition of the body heat theory of Max Rubner
  1953
• Dictionary of scientific biography Volume 11
  1975