Edgar von Gierke

Edgar Otto Conrad von Gierke (9 February 1877, in Breslau – 21 October 1945, in Karlsruhe) was a German Jewish pathologist who specialized in glycogenesis and discovered glycogen storage disease type I (formerly known as von Gierke disease) in 1929. Edgar was born in 1877 the Prussian province of Silesia in Breslau to a famous Pomeranian German family. He was the son of the noted legal scholar Otto von Gierke and Marie Caecilie Elise (Lili) née Loening (1850–1936). Edgar had a sister named Anna von Gierke and a brother named Julius. Marie was an Evangelical Christian but her parents had converted from Judaism to Christianity in the 1840s prior to her birth. Thus, under the racial laws of German Nazi rule, she was considered to be Jewish as was Edgar, who identified as a Protestant. As a result, Edgar was labeled "Mischling 1. Grades" ("half-breed 1st degree") by the Nazi party. In 1896, von Gierke served one year as a military volunteer in the Silesian Field Artillery Regiment and subsequently served as a staff surgeon of the reserve during World War I. He participated in the Battle of Lorraine. He received his medical doctorate at Heidelberg University in 1901 and became a lecturer at the University of Freiburg in 1904. Several years later he became a prosector at the municipal hospital in Karlsruhe. In 1908, von Gierke took over the managing position of the Pathological-Bacteriological Institute of the Karlsruhe Municipal Hospitals for his colleague Ernst Schwalbe and retained this position for nearly 30 years. In 1911, von Gierke also became an associate professor of bacteriology at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe. During his career, he published the highly regarded on anatomy book Taschenbuch der pathologischen Anatomie (Pocketbook of Pathological Anatomy). von Gierke published a seminal article in 1929 detailing his discovery of a newly described glycogen storage disease that affected the liver and kidneys that he discovered on an autopsy of an affected child. He originally termed the disease "Hepato-Nephromegalia glykogenica".