Armin Kutzsche

Armin Karl Wilhelm (A.K.W.) Kutzsche (17 February 1914 – 19 February 1995) was a German physician, microbiologist and industrial scientist. He was a researcher at the universities of Freiburg and Frankfurt, and at the pharmaceutical companies Cassella, Schering and Merck. At Cassella and Schering, he was head of microbiological research and development in the 1950s and 1960s.

Career

He studied medicine at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Freiburg, and graduated in 1937. He obtained his doctorate in 1939, with a dissertation on the influence on tumor grafts by lipoid tumors, supervised by Bernhard Fischer-Wasels, and later became a specialist in internal medicine. Early in his career, he was a resident at the Paul Ehrlich Institute and various hospitals, was drafted as a military physician (captain) in the Army Medical Service, and worked as a bacteriologist at Uhlenhuth's research laboratory at the University of Freiburg. He was an assistant professor in Schlossberger's research group at the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Infection Control at the Goethe University Frankfurt 1945–1949.

From 1949 to 1959 he was director of the Microbiological Laboratory of

Cassella Farbwerke Mainkur Aktiengesellschaft Cassella (now Sanofi) in Frankfurt, and had a key role in rebuilding Cassella's pharmaceutical research. He was director of the Department of Medical Microbiology at Schering (now Bayer) in West Berlin 1959–1965, and held a secondary appointment at the Research Department of Electron Microscopy at the Free University of Berlin. From 1965 to 1968 he was a principal scientist at the Merck Microbiological Laboratory in Darmstadt. He was chief physician at the Flehe Geriatric Clinic in Düsseldorf 1968–1970, and was a general practitioner and chirotherapist in Offenbach am Main 1970–1984.

Research and scholarship

His scientific work focused on bacteriology, and antibacterial agents in particular, e.g. sulfonamide-based and steroid antibacterials. He has published papers in Medical Microbiology and Immunology, Immunobiology, Drug Research, Cell and Tissue Research, Chemotherapy, Microbiological Research, Antibiotics and Chemotherapy, Clinical Laboratory, Naturwissenschaften, the Journal of Molecular Medicine, and other journals.

He was a co-inventor of several patents held by German pharmaceutical companies, notably of bacteria-inhibiting steroids, with Emanuel Kaspar et al., and 3-methyl-5-isopropylphenyl esters of n-pyrrolidino and n-morpholino carboxylic acids, with Mahmoud Muftić and Horst Peissker. He was also a contributor to the 1952 edition of the book Experimental Bacteriology. He was a member of the editorial boards of the medical journals Internal Medicine (from 1948), Microbiological Research (from 1949) and Physiology, Physiological Chemistry, Pharmacology (from 1956). He was a member of the German Society for Hygiene and Microbiology, of the Senckenberg Nature Research Society, and of the Schopenhauer Society.

Scientific publications