Danilevskii, Aleksandr

Born Dec. 10 (22), 1838, in Kharkov; died July 18, 1923, in Petrograd. Russian biochemist. Corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1898).

Danilevskii graduated from the department of medicine of the University of Kharkov in 1860. In 1863 he became a professor at the University of Kazan. In 1871 he resigned with a group of professors in protest against the persecution of the progressive scientist and anatomist P. F. Lesgaft. From 1872 to 1875, Danilevskii worked in Voronezh, Kharkov, and St. Petersburg and then in Germany and Switzerland. In 1885 he became a professor at the University of Kharkov and in 1892, at the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg. His main works were devoted to enzymes, the chemistry of proteins, and problems of nutrition. He was the first to devise the adsorption method for separating enzymes of the pancreas. He proposed a theory of the structure of the protein molecule, the theory of elementary rows. From 1888 to 1891 together with his brother V. Ia. Danilevskii he published two volumes of the Fiziologicheskii sbornik (Physiological Collection), the first Russian physiological journal.