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BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Baer Karl Maksimovich. Biography of a scientist
Directory / Biographies of great scientists
Karl Ernst, or, as he was called in Russia, Karl Maksimovich Baer, was born on February 17 (28), 1792 in the town of Pip, in the Gerven district of the Estland province. Baer's father, Magnus von Baer, belonged to the Estonian nobility and was married to his cousin Julia von Baer. Little Carl early began to be interested in various objects of nature and often brought home various fossils, snails and the like. At the age of seven, Baer not only could not read, but did not know a single letter. Subsequently, he was very pleased that "he did not belong to the number of those phenomenal children who, because of the ambition of their parents, are deprived of a bright childhood." Then home teachers worked with Karl. He studied mathematics, geography, Latin and French, and other subjects. Eleven-year-old Karl has already become familiar with algebra, geometry and trigonometry. In August 1807, the boy was taken to a noble school at the city cathedral in Revel. After questioning, which looked like an exam, the director of the school assigned him to the senior class (prima), ordering him to attend only Greek lessons in the junior classes, in which Baer was not prepared at all. In the first half of 1810, Karl completed the course of the school. He enters Dorpat University. In Dorpat, Baer decided to choose a medical career, although, by his own admission, he himself did not know well why he was making this choice. When Napoleon's invasion of Russia followed in 1812 and MacDonald's army threatened Riga, many of the Derpt students, including Baer, went, like true patriots, to the theater of operations, to Riga, where typhus raged in the Russian garrison and in the urban population. . Karl also fell ill with typhus, but he survived the disease safely. In 1814, Baer passed the examination for the degree of doctor of medicine. He presented and defended his dissertation "On Epidemic Diseases in Estonia". But still realizing the insufficiency of the knowledge gained, he asked his father to send him to complete his medical education abroad. His father gave him a small amount, on which, according to Baer's calculations, he could live for a year and a half, and the same amount was lent to him by his elder brother. Baer went abroad, choosing to continue his medical education in Vienna, where such famous people of the time as Hildebrand, Rust, Beer and others taught. In the autumn of 1815, Baer arrived in Würzburg to another famous scientist, Dellinger, to whom he handed, instead of a letter of recommendation, a bag of mosses, explaining his desire to study comparative anatomy. The very next day, Karl, under the guidance of an old scientist, set about dissecting a leech from a pharmacy. In this way, he independently studied the structure of various animals. All his life, Baer kept the liveliest gratitude to Dellinger, who spared neither time nor labor for his education. Baer's funds, meanwhile, were coming to an end, so he was delighted with the offer of Professor Burdakh to join him as a dissector at the Department of Physiology at the University of Königsberg. As a dissector, Baer immediately opened a course on the comparative anatomy of invertebrates, which was of an applied nature, since it consisted mainly of showing and explaining anatomical preparations and drawings. Since then, Baer's teaching and research activities have entered their permanent groove. He supervised the practical classes of students in the anatomical theater, taught courses in human anatomy and anthropology, and found time to prepare and publish special independent works. In 1819, he managed to get a promotion: he was appointed extraordinary professor of zoology with an assignment to take up the organization of the zoological museum at the university. In general, this year was a happy one in Baer's life: he married one of the residents of Koenigsberg, Augusta von Medem. Gradually, in Koenigsberg, Baer became one of the prominent and beloved members of an intelligent society - not only among professors, but also in many families that had no direct relationship to the university. Having an excellent command of the German literary language, Baer sometimes wrote German poetry, and, moreover, very good and smooth. “I must repent,” Baer says in his autobiography, “that one day it really occurred to me that a poet was not sitting in me. But my attempts found out to me that Apollo was not sitting at my cradle. If I wrote not humorous poems , then the ludicrous element nevertheless involuntarily crept in in the form of empty pathos or a tearing elegy. In 1826, Baer was appointed ordinary professor of anatomy and director of the anatomical institute, relieving him of his duties as a dissector until now. That was the time of the upsurge in the creative scientific activity of the scientist. In addition to lectures on zoology and anatomy, which he read at the university, he wrote a number of special works on animal anatomy, made many reports in learned societies on natural history and anthropology. Cuvier, who published his theory in 1812, is considered to be the author of the theory of types based on comparative anatomical data. Baer independently came to similar conclusions, but published his work only in 1826. However, the theory of types would be of much less importance if it were based solely on anatomy and was not supported by data from the history of the development of organisms. The latter was done by Baer, and this gives him the right to be considered, along with Cuvier, the founder of the theory of types. But Baer's greatest success came from embryological research. In 1828, the first volume of his famous "History of the Development of Animals" appeared in print. Baer, studying the embryology of the chicken, observed that early stage of development, when two parallel ridges form on the germinal plate, subsequently closing and forming a brain tube. The scientist was struck by the idea that "the type directs development, the embryo develops, following the basic plan according to which the body of organisms of this class is arranged." He turned to other vertebrates and found in their development a brilliant confirmation of his thought. The enormous significance of Baer's History of the Development of Animals lies not only in the clear elucidation of the basic embryological processes, but mainly in the brilliant conclusions presented at the end of the first volume of this work under the general title of Scholia and Corollaria. The famous zoologist Balfour said that all studies on vertebrate embryology that came out after Baer can be considered as additions and amendments to his work, but cannot give anything as new and important as the results obtained by Baer. Asking himself the question about the essence of development, Baer answered it: all development consists in the transformation of something that previously existed. "This proposition is so simple and unsophisticated," says another scientist Rosenberg, "that it seems almost meaningless. And yet it is of great importance." The fact is that in the process of development, each new formation arises from a simpler pre-existing basis. Thus, an important law of development is being clarified - first, general bases appear in the embryo, and more and more special parts are isolated from them. This process of gradual movement from the general to the specific is known today under the name of differentiation. By elucidating the principle of germ differentiation, Baer put an end once and for all to the theory of preformation, or evolution. The final triumph of the principle of epigenesis took place. In addition to the most interesting general conclusions, Baer's embryological works are also rich in factual discoveries of capital importance. Of these discoveries, the discovery in 1826 of the eggs of mammals should be placed first. This discovery was made public by him in the form of a message addressed to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, which elected him as its corresponding member. Another very important discovery made by Baer is the discovery of the dorsal string, the basis of the internal skeleton of vertebrates. Embryology owes to him the first quite clear and detailed description of the development of the fetal membranes (amnion and allantois), the improvement of knowledge about the germ layers, the description of the formation of the brain from bubbles, the formation of the eye in the form of a protrusion from the anterior cerebral bladder, the development of the heart, and so on. In a word, despite its enormous theoretical significance, the History of the Development of Animals is a real treasury of factual discoveries. In the autumn of 1829 Baer went to Russia. But after a short stay in St. Petersburg, which made an unfavorable impression on him, the scientist again settled in Konigsberg, to the great joy of his family and friends. His situation continued to improve: the government allocated funds for the construction of a new building for the zoological museum, in which Baer was given an apartment. Baer continued his scientific studies with extraordinary zeal. He sat at the microscope for days on end and, in the end, greatly upset his naturally strong health. While Baer was thinking about how he could change his position, an unforeseen event led to a new turn in his career. The elder brother Ludwig fell ill and died; the family estate in Estland he managed was burdened with debts and required good management, which could not be expected from anywhere else but from Karl. Thus, Baer had to go back to Estonia. He decides to send a request to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences: will there be a free place for him in it? The Academy responded by electing Baer again as a member, and thus the final resettlement of Baer to Russia was decided. At the end of 1834, Baer was already living in St. Petersburg. From the capital, in the summer of 1837, the scientist traveled to Novaya Zemlya, where no naturalist had ever been before. Baer was delighted with the abundance and novelty of the impressions made on him by this poor and brutally harsh country. This journey entailed the desire for new similar enterprises. In 1839, Baer made a trip with his eldest son Karl to explore the islands of the Gulf of Finland, and in 1840, together with the future famous traveler Middendorf, he visited the Kola Peninsula. Thus, Baer became more and more involved in the study of geography, and from 1840 he began to publish, together with Gelmersen, a special journal at the academy, entitled Materials for the Knowledge of the Russian Empire. His travels, however, were interrupted for a time by the new duties assigned to him. Since 1841, the scientist was appointed ordinary professor of comparative anatomy and physiology at the Medico-Surgical Academy. But the position of professor, although it significantly increased the content, so burdened him, leaving at the same time no convenience for independent zoological work, that Baer resigned this title in 1852. Despite his passion for geographical work, Baer still did not leave the hope of doing something else on the history of animal development. In the summers of 1845 and 1846 he traveled abroad to the southern seas and worked on the anatomy and embryology of lower animals in Genoa, Venice and Trieste. With the death of Academician Zagorsky, Baer was transferred to the Department of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology and was supposed to take over the management of the Academy's anatomical museum. The embryological material collected in Trieste remained unprocessed; Baer's last attempt to return to embryology was unsuccessful. But the management of the anatomical museum again awakened in him an attraction to anthropology, in which he was very interested in Königsberg, and especially to craniology (the study of the human skull). In 1851, Baer submitted to the Academy of Sciences a large article "On Man", intended for Semashko's "Russian Fauna" and translated into Russian. Since 1851, a series of Baer's travels to different places in Russia began, undertaken for practical purposes and involving Baer, in addition to geographical and ethnographic research, in the field of applied zoology. He conducted expeditions to Lake Peipsi and the shores of the Baltic Sea, to the Volga and the Caspian Sea. His "Caspian studies" in eight parts are very rich in scientific results. In this work of Baer, the eighth part - "On the General Law of the Formation of River Channels" - is most interesting. We are talking about a remarkable phenomenon, which later received the name of Baer's law, under this name it entered the textbooks of geography. Baer, during his many travels, could not fail to notice that the right bank of Russian rivers (if you look in the direction of the river) is usually high, and the left is low. Thinking about the cause of this phenomenon, he came to the following theory. If the flowing water is directed approximately parallel to the meridian, from the equator to the pole, then due to the rotation of the globe from west to east, the water, bringing with it a greater rotation speed than in the northern latitudes, will press with particular force on the eastern, that is, the right bank, which therefore, it will be steeper and higher than the left one. In the spring of 1857 the scientist returned to St. Petersburg. He felt already too old for long and tedious wanderings. Now Baer devoted himself mainly to anthropology. He put in order and enriched the collection of human skulls in the anatomical museum of the academy, gradually turning it into an anthropological museum. In 1858, he traveled to Germany in the summer, took part in the congress of natural scientists and doctors in Karlsruhe, and was engaged in craniological research in the Basel Museum. In addition to anthropology, Baer did not cease, however, to be interested in other branches of natural science, trying to promote their development and dissemination in Russia. So, he took an active part in the creation and organization of the Russian Entomological Society and became its first president. Although Baer enjoyed general respect and had no shortage of friendly society, he did not particularly like life in Petersburg. Therefore, he was looking for opportunities to leave Petersburg and go somewhere to live out the rest of his life in peace, devoting himself exclusively to his scientific inclinations, without any official duties. In 1862 he retired and was elected an honorary member of the academy. On August 18, 1864, a solemn celebration of his anniversary took place at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. The emperor granted the hero of the day a lifetime annual pension of 3 rubles, and the Baer Prize was established at the Academy of Sciences for outstanding research in the natural sciences. After the anniversary, Baer considered his St. Petersburg career finally completed and decided to move to Dorpat, since, having gone abroad, he would have been too far away from his children. Baer's family by this time had been greatly reduced: his only daughter, Maria, married Dr. von Lingen in 1850, and of his six sons, only three survived; Baer's wife died in the spring of 1864. In the early summer of 1867 he moved to his native university town. The elderly scientist continued to be interested in science here, at rest. He prepared his unpublished works for publication and, as far as possible, followed the progress of knowledge. His mind was still as clear and active, but his physical forces began to betray him more and more. On November 16 (28), 1876, Baer died quietly, as if he had fallen asleep. Author: Samin D.K.
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