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André Mayer
French physician, born November 9, 1875, Paris; died May 27, 1956.
Associated eponyms:
Lamy, Mayer and Rathéry theory
A theory of renal secretion.
Biography:
This article is based on a biography of André Mayer written by his son, Jean Mayer, 1920-1993.
André Mayer was the son Jeanne Eugenie Mayer and Myrtil Mayer, a self-made textile businessman who invented the feather boa and later became active in politics. He founded a number of hospitals, clinics, and sanatoriums the largest of which, situated in Vosges, bears his name.
Andre was a brilliant student in the sciences as well as in the classics and entered medical school at the age of 16. Towards the end of his medical studies he started concurrently a science degree at the Sorbonne in the laboratory of Albert Dastre. He also spent a short period in Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald’s (1853-1932) laboratory in Leipzig.
When he was twenty-three he demonstrated the constancy of the osmotic pressure of the internal environment and showed that sudation, pulmonary evaporation and even fluid deprivation altered osmotic concentration only very slowly. The concept of osmotic constancy was so new that the Société de Biologie appointed a special commission to examine the implications of these findings.
Mayers’s book “On Thirst”, which appeared in 1900, created a sensation among psychologists and philosophers as well as among physiologists; for the first time a basic psychological drive was related to measurable parameters in the body; and a physiological regulation entailing a specific behaviour was clearly related to physico-chemical variations.
Mayer became a friend of Pierre Curie and this led him to make the first observation of the effect of radiation on living organisms. Curie said, in the course of one of their conversations: "You are a physician, I wish you would look at a sore I have which does not heal." Mayer looked at the sore which resembled a burn and was situated just under Curie’s right vest pocket. Mayer asked whether
Curie carried in his pocket anything which might rub against his skin. Curie said no, all he carried in this pocket was a small tube with a little radium in it. Mayer tested the tube on a colloid preparation which collapsed, then taped it onto the skin of a mouse which developed a burn similar to that of Curie.
When World War I broke out Mayer volunteered and became battalion surgeon at the First Marne, then at Verdun. When the German army at tacked the Canadians with poison gas, he was called back to organize the biological component of the Allied Chemical Warfare Service. Given overriding authority to call back from the Army the personnel he required and to requisition laboratories, he showed himself a superb administrator of large-scale scientific, military and industrial programs, and within the span of a few months had been given enormous executive powers and become a trusted major advisor to the Allied Commander-in-Chief and the Allied Governments.
The first reaction of many Allied scientists had been that it was folly to believe that France and the United Kingdom could win a ”chemical” war against Germany and that the only course of action was immediate negotiation–in effect a capitulation. Andre Mayer and his British associate, Joseph Barcroft, convinced the doubters that the physiology, pharmacology, and biochemistry they could deploy were a match for ”German” science were the key to victory in "chemical" war fare. They conceived, manufactured, and distributed in record time millions of the first military gas masks so that the second German chemical attack – which occurred only a few weeks after the pilot experiment on the Canadian front – failed. Through the development of new compounds and techniques they went on to put the enemy on the defensive in this field. They were helped from 1917 on by their American colleagues, Walter Cannon and L. J. Henderson in particular. André Mayer's crucial contributions to the Allied victory were recognized by high decorations from almost all Allied armies: French, British, Rumanian, Greek, Yugoslav, Japanese, etc.
In 1919 André Mayer married Jeanne Eugénie, one of his pre-war students and wartime assistants. The same year he was named Professor of Physiology in the Medical School of the University of Strasbourg. In 1922 he was elected Professor at the Collège de France in Paris. In 1929 he became co-director of the Institute for Biophysics and Biochemistry with Jean Perrin, a physicist and Nobel Laureate, and with the great chemist, George Urbain, the discoverer of eleven new (rare earth) elements and the theoretician of inorganic complexes.
It was in his laboratory at the Collège de France that pioneer work on the influence of oxygen and CO2 pressure, of hydration and of toxicity, and ionic concentration on the respiration of animal and vegetable tissues – basic to the subsequent development of biochemistry – was undertaken in the early twenties in collaboration with L. Plantefol. André Mayer went back to the study of 1,2,4-dinitrophenol, the action of which he had discovered in 1916 in his famous toxicological investigation. He showed that its hyperthermic effect in the whole animal was due to a hypermetabolic effect in tissues. He concluded that there can be a purely chemical thermogenesis : heat production can be increased by methods other than shivering and exercise.
Mayer’s analysis of the mode of action of dinitrophenol through the use of methylene blue and other hydrogen acceptors, culminating in his demonstration in 1932 that the energy released by oxidative reactions is released in the presence of dinitrophenol as heat instead of being stored as high energy compounds, was a technical and intellectual tour de force considering the state of biochemistry at that period.
André Mayer conducted research of fundamental importance on nutrition. To understand his decisive contribution to the creation of the international institutions concerned with nutrition, we must look at his own history and at the history of ideas during his lifetime. As an ardent and resourceful mountain climber he became familiar early in life with people who are forced to extract a meager and precarious livelihood from a difficult environment, and developed profound sympathy and, indeed, great affection for them.
As a very young man, in the year 1898 when he was 23, he took a long trip to Morocco, including long forays into areas generally forbidden to outsiders. He looked at ”underdeveloped areas” with what would now be considered a "modern" view, but was then considered a revolutionary perspective. Through the exotic facade he saw millions of men, women and children, not as picturesque natives inhabit ing a romantic land, but as fellow human beings who were sick and malnourished in a world where the means existed to bring scarcity and sickness to an end. Throughout his life, he never lost the ability to combine a clear appraisal of the technical aspects of a health or nutritional situation with a feeling of outrage that a preventable problem had lasted so long,
and he maintained the fortitude, the patience and the organizational ability to bring about the necessary correction.
During World War II André Mayer had the opportunity to translate his ideas on nutrition into major institutions. After having, once again, served as the chief scientist for defense against chemical war
fare for the Allies in 1939-1940, he had be come the head of the Free French medical and scientific mission to the United States and from 1941 to 1944 commuted between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Washing ton, B.C. In 1942, André Mayer and Frank McDougall approached Mrs. Roosevelt and, through her, President Rossevelt, with a view to implementing the ”Freedon from Want" through the creation of an international organization devoted to food and agriculture. President Roosevelt was impressed by the arguments of the two Geneva veterans and agreed to call a preliminary conference the first United Nations Meeting – in Hot Springs, Virginia, in May 1943. A decision was taken to appoint a commission to elaborate a constitution for food and agriculture; André Mayer took the leading part in this work and at the first meeting of the FAO Conference – in Quebec City in October 1945 – was elected chairman of the Executive Committee of FAO.
He travelled extensively, often to distant areas in which he organized and supervised nutritional surveys. After his wife died in early 1956, he departed for Senegal and Mali where, at the age of 81, he inspected survey teams in isolated villages hundreds of miles from the coast. He returned with jaundice, first diagnosed in Africa as due to infectious hepatitis, but which turned out to be due to a carcinoma of the head of the pancreas. After less than ten days of enforced inactivity, following an unsuccessful operation, he died on May 27, 1956, interested in every thing but his own suffering. To the very end, when he was in great physical pain, he showed to his visitors and to the hospital staff, including its humblest members, the same innate courtesy and concern for their welfare that he had shown to every man, woman or child his life had touched.
Jean Mayer:
André Mayer. A Biographical Sketch (1875-1956). The Journal of Nutrition, volume 88: 1-8.
Downloaded from www.nutrition.org on July 1, 2009.
You can fnd the complete article on: http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/reprint/99/1/1.pdf
Jean Mayer was Professor of Nutrition and Lecturer on the History of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts, and Special Consultant to the President, The White House, Washington, D. C.
We thank André Trombeta for information submitted.
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