This page contains a review of New Beer in an Old Bottle: Eduard Buchner and the Growth of Biochemical Knowledge by Keith L. Manchester published in Trends in Biochemical Sciences 24 125 (1999)
This book, written to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first preparation by Eduard Buchner
in 1896/1897 of a juice that could be expressed from yeast and carry out fermentation, is an
unusual presentation. First, we have a facsimile in German of Buchner’s original paper, which is
followed by an English (Alcoholic Fermentation without Yeast Cells
) and then a Spanish translation.
This tour de force is followed by two articles (by Fritz Schlenk and by Arthur Kornberg)
reproduced from TiBS,
chapters on the historical background to Buchner’s work,
including a particularly detailed one by Herbert Friedmann, and then others on modern studies
of multi-enzyme systems. English now reigns supreme.
Kornberg notes how 1897 was an annus mirabilis: the events of that year included the discovery of the electron by J. J. Thomson in Cambridge. One could add that X-rays and radioactivity were discovered by Wilhelm Roentgen and Henri Becquerel, respectively, in 1896 and that radium was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898.
Schlenk records how both humour and jeering satire
, to use Buchner’s words, are occasionally
found in the scientific literature. Wöhler, as well as being the first (in 1828) to synthesize urea in
the laboratory (I can no longer hold back my chemical urine
), is credited with writing an article
that derided the very idea that the sedimenting slurry of yeast that arises during fermentation
could be visualized as discrete cells or that fermentation could be a cellular process. In the
Annalen der Pharmacie in 1839, he described how he himself, using a very powerful
microscope, had seen incredible numbers of small animals that had the shape of a distilling flask and
that ate sugar. From the anus of the animal one can see the incessant emergence of a fluid that is
lighter than the liquid medium; and from their enormously large genitals a stream of CO2
is squirted at very short intervals.
Buchner1 himself pointed out how the German
expression die Hefe des Volkes
, which means the outcasts of the nation, contributed to reluctance
to accept that yeast was anything other than sludge.
Buchner suggested that fermentation was carried out by an enzyme that he called zymase—he seems to have been unaware that the name had already been coined in 1864 by Antoine Béchamp to describe the fermentation agent in yeast. If one wants to be critical, it is perhaps a pity that this historical point does not receive a mention anywhere. In addition, more space should perhaps have been devoted to extracts from Arthur Harden’s classic text Alcoholic Fermentation, which went through a series of editions in the early years of this century. I did, however, enjoy Cornish-Bowden’s explanatory chapter on why it is that, in fermentation by yeast juice, fructose 1,6-bisphosphate accumulates. The chapter by Robert Scopes that describes the ATPase-related control of glycolysis in muscle is also informative, as are subsequent chapters on what can be learned from computer modelling and application of metabolic-control analysis—not unexpected material, given the interests of the editor.
Buchner’s discovery of the fermentive action of his yeast juice was accidental—he added
sugar as a preservative—but, in Louis Pasteur’s famous words, chance favours the prepared
mind.
Buchner was lucky, given that many others, including Pasteur and his associates,
unsuccessfully had sought to show that fermentation by yeast extracts was possible. Pasteur
was forced reluctantly to conclude that all fermentations properly designated as such are
correlative with physiological phenomena
, which brought him into conflict with Marcelin
Berthelot, whose avowed aim was to banish life from all explanations relating to organic
chemistry.
The fact that the type of brewers’ yeast required to produce an active extract is important
remains a matter of curiosity. Had this not been so, and had Pasteur or others in the 1850s
been successful in what they so wished to achieve, how much more rapidly might our knowledge
of intermediary metabolism have advanced? It is a far cry from Buchner’s superficially trivial,
yet in the event epoch making, discovery to present-day attempts at applying genetic engineering
to enzymes critical to metabolic pathways. Buchner concluded his Nobel lecture with the words:
We must never let ourselves fall into the way of thinking
1.
It is in this context that we should commemorate someone who made so much possible.
we shall never know
1Buchner, E. (1907) Nobel Lectures: Chemistry (1901–1966), pp. 103–120, Elsevier
Keith L. Manchester
Dept of Biochemistry, University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, South Africa