Felix Hoppe-Seyler

Who was Felix Hoppe-Seyler?

Ernst Felix Immanuel Hoppe-Seyler was a German physiologist and chemist.

Hoppe-Seyler was born in Freyburg an der Unstrut in the Province of Saxony. He originally trained to be a physician in Halle and Leipzig, and received his medical doctorate from Berlin in 1851. Afterwards, he was an assistant to Rudolf Virchow at the Pathological Institute in Berlin. Hoppe-Seyler preferred scientific research to medicine, and later held positions in anatomy, applied chemistry, and physiological chemistry in Greifswald, Tübingen and Strasbourg. At Strasbourg, he was head of the department of biochemistry, the only such institution in Germany at the time.

He was one of the founders of biochemistry, physiological chemistry and molecular biology, and his work led to advances in organic chemistry by his students and by immunologist Paul Ehrlich. Among his students and collaborators were Friedrich Miescher and Nobel laureate Albrecht Kossel.