Woywodt and Matteson supported this change in their paper. The movement came to a head in a paper by Falk and colleagues in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. Falk and colleagues acknowledged that changing the name of a disease is never an easy proposition, but that the clinical community is likely to make this change in light of the historical background.
For Matteson, the issue is that, as in the case with Wegener and Klinger, it is often not the first describer of the disease who ends up with the name, which is obviously problematic. Another issue for Matteson is that the identification of a disease is rarely accomplished by just one individual. What is important is that we have accurate descriptions of the diseases.
My lesson is not to condemn but to learn. For more information: Eric L. Matteson, MD, can be reached at First St. SW, Rochester, MN ; email: matteson. Read next. April 18, He was a difficult scientist to pigeonhole.
And for geologists he was an outsider who dared to question the foundations of their science, so most of them rejected his ideas with the backing of figures like Einstein, who wrote the prologue to a book that ridiculed Wegener.
It is also true that he made some blunders, calculating that Greenland was approaching North America at a rate of 1. That was like saying that a plough can move on its own and leave no furrows. Tests were done, but with the most reliable instruments of the time no movement of the continents was detected. The edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica still did not believe Wegener, but that year many geologists began siding with him, in view of new evidence.
This new theory— plate tectonics —also explained that earthquakes and tsunamis occur when two plates rub against one another, and that when they collide head-on, large mountain ranges are formed.
In addition, thanks to geolocation satellites, we are now able to detect that Europe and North America are moving apart, although at the same speed that a fingernail grows: two metres in a lifetime.
Today we have all learned at school—or even before, in cartoons—the theory of continental drift. But Wegener died in , long before his success was recognised. During an expedition in Greenland, he left the camp for supplies and was found frozen months later.
He was buried there and is still there, although he is now about two metres further away from his birthplace in Berlin. Click Enter. Login Profile. Es En. Economy Humanities Science Technology. In addition to these duties, he found time to write his famous book on continental drift. After World War I the ambitious and by then well-known Wegener was still having trouble finding a professorship. In he accepted an offer from the University of Graz Austria , where he spent fruitful years as an academic teacher and researcher.
In the early s, academic life was still disrupted by the consequences of World War I. All in all, Wegener participated in four polar expeditions: the Danmark Expedition — , the glaciological Danish North Greenland Expedition with Johann Peter Koch , the pre-expedition , documented neither in the Deutsches Museum archives nor in this virtual exhibition, and the German Greenland Expedition — He is well known as an expert on Greenland and for his close relations with the Inuit populations of Denmark and Greenland.
Wegener was an experienced polar explorer and many of his scientific goals can be traced to the early expeditions where he was already starting to pursue glaciological and meteorological questions.
Although his final expedition faced many difficulties and ended with his tragic death, it pursued an ambitious scientific program that served as a reference for subsequent international expeditions.
You may choose to read the diaries in their original state, or browse the expeditions individually and read transcribed and translated excerpts by clicking on the individual chapters. This version, published in , includes minor updates to the original virtual exhibition.
Christian Kehrt works in the fields of environmental history, military history, and the history of science and technology. As a postdoc he worked at the Deutsches Museum in Munich on a project on the origins of nanotechnology. Currently he is pursuing a habilitation project on polar exploration in the period of the Cold War at the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg where he holds a position as a research associate. Skip to main content. Biography of Alfred Wegener Alfred Wegener — became internationally known for his heavily disputed theory of continental drift, which he formulated as early as Previous chapter Next chapter.
Christian Kehrt. About the author.
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