Biography Holzapfel
Your scientific career began at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Silicate Research and ended in early retirement. Luise Holzapfel researched organic silicic acid compounds and the occupational lung disease silicosis.
Luise Holzapfel was born on 14 March 1900 in Höxter on the River Weser and grew up in a respectable middle-class family of lawyers. Her father, Wilhelm Holzapfel, was a senior civil servant; her mother, Elsa, did not work outside the home. Holzapfel sat her school-leaving exams at the age of 29 at an evening school in Berlin, something unusual for young women at the time. From 1929 to 1934, she studied chemistry, physics, technology and economics at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. In October 1936, she became the first woman to receive a doctorate from the newly established Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. Her doctoral thesis was entitled ‘On the photochemical combustion of carbon monoxide’.
In 1939, Holzapfel was appointed as a research associate at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Silicate Research in Berlin-Dahlem. She completed her habilitation there in 1943 with a thesis on ‘Organic silicic acid compounds’. The following year, she was appointed lecturer, and from 1945 she headed a department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Silicate Research, where she continued to work on organic silicic acid compounds. When the West German institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society were transferred to the Max Planck Society, Holzapfel’s department became a branch of the Max Planck Institute for Silicate Research in Würzburg in 1952, but had to close ten years later for financial reasons. Holzapfel was placed in early retirement in 1963.
Alongside her fundamental contributions to organic silicon compounds, Holzapfel made a name for herself as a researcher into silicosis, the lung disease caused by quartz dust, which is now recognised as an occupational disease. The association ‘Natur und Technik’, based in her birthplace of Höxter, chose the silicate researcher as the namesake for its STEM competition (STEM stands for mathematics, computer science, natural sciences and technology), in which children and young people can win the Luise Holzapfel Prize.
Luise Holzapfel died after a serious illness on 21 September 1963 in Berlin.
Source
A. Vogt, Berlinische Monatsschrift 9, 2000, 3, p. 80
Authors
Prof. Dr. Eberhard Ehlers
Prof. Dr. Heribert Offermanns
Editorial work
Dr. Uta Neubauer
Project management
Dr. Karin J. Schmitz (GDCh-public relations)
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