Selig Hecht: correspondence
Extent and Medium
1 folder
Biographical History
Selig Hecht, American biophysicist,was born in Glogow, Austria (now Poland). He moved to the United States in 1898 and was graduated from the College of the City of New York (B.S., 1913) and from Harvard (Ph.D., 1917). After organizing the laboratory of biophysics at Columbia Univ., he was professor of biophysics there from 1926. He pioneered in applying physiochemical principles to sensory physiology and is known for his determination of minimal quantal requirements at the threshold of vision and for his successful laboratory regeneration of visual purple. An advocate of popular scientific education, he wrote Explaining the Atom (1947).
Acquisition
Donor: Mrs Baer
Scope and Content
This collection consists of 2 letters written by Selig Hecht, a German born American scientist, on a visit to Europe. The first, a letter to a colleague back home, outlines the problems facing Jewish academics in Nazi Germany, and introduces the second which is a much more detailed picture of the privations suffered by Jewish academics and also the indifference of the non-Jewish population, and the culmination of a latent antisemitism in the profession that had long pre-dated the Nazi seizure of power. The latter is addressed to Alfred Cohen. Others mentioned include Willstaetter, Fajans, and Alfred Wiener in his role as Syndikus or director of the organisation Centralverein deutscher Staatsbuerger Juedischen Glaubens.
Conditions Governing Access
Open