Moritz Traube

Who was Moritz Traube?

Moritz Traube was a German chemist and universal private scholar.

Traube worked on chemical, biochemical, medical, physiological, pathophysiological problems, he was engaged in hygienics, physically chemistry and chemical basic research. Although he was never a staff member of a university and earned his living as a wine merchant, he was able to refute theories of his leading contemporaries, including Justus von Liebig, Louis Pasteur, Felix Hoppe-Seyler and Julius Sachs, and to develop significant theories of his own with solid experimental foundations. The chemistry of oxygen and its significance to the organism were the central objects of his research and provided the common thread uniting almost all of his scientific activity.

Moritz Traube was a younger brother of the famous Berlin physician Ludwig Traube, the co-founder of the German experimental pathology. A son, Wilhelm Traube, evolved a process of purine synthesis. Hermann Traube, another son, was a mineralogist.