FERINGA’S ILLUSTRIOUS PREDECESSORS

Not everyone’s a winner

The Nobel Prize has been awarded every year since 1901. Only one other person at the RUG has ever won it besides Feringa: Frits Zernike, who was awarded the prize in 1953 for his invention of the phase-contrast microscope. Over the years, however, the RUG has had many more chances to bag the prize. Time to meet Ben Feringa’s illustrious predecessors.

1. Frederik ‘Frits’ Zernike (1888-1966)

Physics

My name is Frederik Zernike, but my friends call me Frits. So can you, if you like. I was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1953. When I heard that my medal had mysteriously disappeared on the way to an exhibition about me, I turned in my grave. Six months later the RUG received a replica, but that was made of gilded bronze rather than 23-carat gold. And now it seems that the original has been found. Isn’t that something?

You would think that a Nobel Prize winner would be deserving of some respect. Alas, my colleagues have even prohibited me from entered my lab at night. I used to like coming here to tinker, and I often used materials I found on my colleagues’ desks. That bit of copper on that table there, for example, will make a great wire which I can use to make a new kind of galvanometer.

At any rate, my colleagues don’t like me tinkering, so now I’m only allowed to come here during the day. And now they’ve taken a building that they were going to name after me and called it the Feringa building instead. As though Feringa would have ever invented that nano-car without the use of a phase-contrast microscope. I think not! Oh well. I’d rather have a Feringa Building at the Zernike campus than the other way around.

For 63 years, Frits Zernike was the only Nobel Prize winner at the RUG. He was awarded the prize in 1953 for the invention of the phase-contrast microscope. The microscope – which Zernike had actually built 20 years prior – enabled biologists to study live cells. Before that, biologists added a colouring agent to the cells to be able to see them, but this killed the cells. Zernike put an end to this with his invention.

2.Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893 – 1986)

Physiology

My name is Albert Szent-Györgyi and I was born in Budapest. After a short break in the First World War where I served on the Italian and Russian frontlines, I got my degree in medicine in my hometown in 1917. I came to the Netherlands via Germany in 1920.

For the first two years, I worked for Willem Storm van Leeuwen in Leiden. I came to Groningen in 1922, where I worked under Hartog Jakob Hamburger in the physiological institute he had founded. Hamburger was charmingly obsessed with his work. I learned much from him, and in Groningen, I laid the groundwork for my vitamin research.

His death in 1924 put an end to that, however. His successor was more interested in psychology than physiology and didn’t think my research was ‘sufficiently relevant’. When Cambridge invited me to continue my research there, it didn’t take long for me to decide. I left for England.

I was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937, for my ‘discoveries in connection with biological combustion processes’, especially as they related to vitamin C and cellular respiration. My work had a practical application: I discovered that sweet peppers contained a lot of vitamin C and were very good at preventing scurvy.

Szent-Györgyi may have won the Nobel Prize, but because H.J. Hamburger’s successor was more interested in psychology than physiology and he and the Hungarian did not really get along, the RUG missed out.

3. Willem Johan ‘Pim’ Kolff (1911 – 2009)

Medicine

I, Pim Kolff, have 113 honorary doctorates, 127 international awards, the titles ‘greatest citizen of Overijssel ever’ and honorary citizen of Kampen, and a planetoid (no. 11427) to my name. The American magazine Life named me as one of the 100 most important people in the 20th century.

I spent my entire career as an internist developing artificial organs. In 1937, I passed my medical finals in Leiden, after which I started my internist training in Groningen. Because my professor, Leo Polak Daniëls, committed suicide when the war broke out and I refused to work for his national-socialist successor, I decided to leave for Kampen, where I worked as an internist in the Engelenbergstichting hospital.

There, I developed the first artificial kidney. I used the remnants of a German bomber plane, a water pump from a Ford Model T, and cellophane from the local butcher shop. The artificial kidney works as follows: the kidney patient’s blood, which contains toxins that under normal circumstances are filtered out by a healthy kidney, is now led through a membrane, where tiny molecules filter the blood. This is how the artificial kidney cleans the patient’s blood. Haemodialysis still works with this principle. I was the first person to successfully apply it. However, I did end up going through 16 patients to achieve those results. Fortunately for me, ethics weren’t such a big deal at the time.

In 1946 I graduated with a first class honours degree in Groningen for my thesis on artificial kidneys, but I was unable to raise sufficient funds to work on the development of other artificial organs. To that end, I emigrated to the United States with my family in 1950. There, I worked on developing a heart-lung machine. Later, in 1957, I created an artificial heart. I managed to keep a dog alive for 90 minutes using this heart.

Willem Kolff was nominated for the Nobel Prize four times but he never won. Of his invention of the artificial kidney, Kolff said: ‘There is nothing about this machine that anyone with elementary scientific knowledge wouldn’t understand’. Maybe that is why he never won. Kolff’s research was very practical and parts of the academic world felt that it was ‘not science’.

4. Pek van Andel (1944)

Experimental ophthalmology

Hello, my name is Pek van Andel. As an experimental ophthalmologist, I don’t shy away from real experiments. And I don’t mean synthesising some lame substances in Petri dishes. In 1991, I attended a conference on medical technology. A scientist showed an MRI scan of someone’s vocal cords while they sang. It was pure art and I loved it! It immediately made me think of sex. Wouldn’t it be amazing to record sexual intercourse with an MRI? Scientifically speaking, there were no objections. Having sex in an MRI machine is perfectly safe. However, it was much more difficult to find test subjects. I would have done it myself, but my wife refused.

Fortunately, a friend of mine thought it was an interesting experiment. She and her boyfriend crawled into the scanner and, together with a scientist friend, I made scans of the intercourse. It was all in secret: we hadn’t put anything down on paper.

You may laugh, but our research certainly had results. The first picture of coitus was by Leonardo da Vinci in 1500 AD. It turned out that much of how coitus has been depicted is false. For one, the erect penis is not actually straight, but rather shaped like a boomerang.

His research got Van Andel very close to a Nobel Prize. In 2000, he was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for his article “Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal”. The Ig Nobel Prize is a parody on the Nobel Prize that was first awarded in 1991. The prize is awarded every year to scientists who ‘first make people laugh and then make them think’.

Van Andel is not the only scientist at the RUG who managed to bag an Ig Nobel Prize. In 2011, Debra Trampe, together with her colleagues Mirjam Tuk at the University of Twente and Luk Warlop from Belgium, won the prize for their research into how a full or empty bladder influenced people’s ability to make decisions.

5. Hessel de Vries (1916-1959)

Physics

My name is Hessel L. de Vries, physicist and professor at the RUG. I improved upon the detection methods and applications of the carbon-14 method developed by W.F. Libby. Well-known archaeologist Albert van Griffen enlisted my help in dating wood from the St. Walburg church in Groningen. I managed to use radioactive carbon to help me estimate the age of the beams. My colleague Libby had been off by a thousand years!

As successful as I was at my job, I was unlucky in love. I was married and had four children, but around 1957, I met the beautiful Anneke. Anneke was my lab assistant and I’ll tell you, every time she walked into the laboratory, it was as if the sun spontaneously began to shine. At first I told myself: ‘Cut it out, De Vries. What would a young girl like that want with an old fart like you?’ But Anneke was in love with me, too. Our secret relationship lasted a year. I can tell you I’ve never been happier.

I knew we couldn’t go on like this. So I decided to divorce my wife and marry Anneke. But my entire world came crashing down when Anneke told me she didn’t want me anymore. She was rejecting me, professor Hessel de Vries, for a snot-nosed punk?! On a cold December night right before Christmas, I went to her house to settle matters.

One year later, in 1960, W.F. Libby was awarded the Nobel Prize of this carbon dating method. Experts agree that if Hessel de Vries had still been alive, he would have shared that prize. After all, De Vries had been instrumental in improving the method. Alas, he was no longer among the living. On that cold December night in 1959, Anneke’s parents found their daughter’s lifeless body in her bedroom in a pool of blood. Next to her was De Vries. He had bashed in their daughter’s skull with two chisels and then ingested cyanide. De Vries died on the way to the hospital.

Rufus Dingelam

Technical chemistry

My name is Dingelam, professor of technical chemistry at the University of Groningen. My full name is Rufus Dingelam, but my wife Gré calls me Roef. I discovered the substance N-Ethyl-8-hydroxytetrahydrochlorophenehydrochloride. But if you don’t know anything about chemistry which, frankly, I’m assuming you don’t, please don’t try to pronounce it. I can’t listen to your bumbling. At any rate, I discovered N-Ethyl-8-hydroxytetrahydrochlorophenehydrochloride approximately 20 years ago. Now, I don’t necessarily want to call myself a brilliant scientist, but get this: a few weeks ago, that twerp Tamstra kicked me out of my lovely room in the laboratory building and gave it to his assistant. I have to make do with a tiny room in the back.

I’m sorry, I’m getting carried away. Back to business. A few days ago, a telegram delivery man came to our country house a stone’s throw away from Sauwerd – which I hate, but that’s beside the point – with news from Sweden. I had won the Nobel Prize for my research into N-Ethyl-8-hydroxytetrahydrochlorphenehydrachloride. My first thought when I heard the news was: ‘That’ll show Tamstra!’ How low can you go, right?

It’s not surprising that Dingelam is never mentioned with the rest of the Groningen Nobel Prize winners. That is because Professor Dingelam is the protagonist in ‘Among Professors’, the famous novel that Willem Frederik Hermans wrote about his short time as a lecturer at the RUG. In Hermans’ controversial book, he makes short work of the ‘bourgeois’ atmosphere at the university.