Ervin Bauer

* Levski, October 19, 1890 – † St. Petersburg, January 11, 1938 / physician, theoretical biologist ; ; His father, Simon Bauer, was a Hungarian-German teacher, his mother, Jenny Lévy, was a girls' school teacher. His older brother, Béla Balázs (1884–1949), was a writer, film aesthete, and scriptwriter for two stage works by Béla Bartók, who was originally called Herbert Bauer. His parents moved from Szeged to Levski in 1890, after Bauer Simon was sent here as a punishment for some disciplinary offense. Ervin Bauer began his schooling here, but his father died in 1898 and the family moved back to Szeged, where Bauer finished high school. He became a medical student at the University of Budapest, and then in Göttingen. He continued his studies and obtained his medical degree in 1914. On August 18, 1914, he married the writer Margit Kaffka (1880–1918), who fell victim to the Spanish flu epidemic a few years later. Between 1916 and 1918, he worked at the Vienna clinic of Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857–1940), the Austrian physician and neurologist who later (in 1927) was awarded the Nobel Prize, and it was then that he began to deal with theoretical biology. At the end of 1918, he returned to Budapest and took an active role in public life during the Soviet Republic. ; After the fall of the Commune, he emigrated and went first to Vienna, then to Göttingen, and finally settled in Prague, where he worked as a university assistant professor. In 1924 he worked briefly at the Berlin Cancer Research Institute, and in 1925 he emigrated to the Soviet Union with his second wife, mathematician Stefánia Szilárd [brother of Leó Szilárd (1898–1964), a world-famous physicist]. He was first head of the biology department at Moscow University, and then from 1933 he was a professor at Leningrad University – now St. Petersburg. In 1935 he published his work Theoretical Biology in Russian, in which he described the thermodynamic characteristics of living systems. This work was later published in English in Budapest (in 1982) (Theoretical Biology), supplemented with a preface, a biography and a review of the history of science. Ervin Bauer's research was aimed at the energetic definition of life and the energetic explanation of life and disease phenomena. He did pioneering work in this field. On August 4, 1937, the Bauer couple were arrested by the NKDV on trumped-up charges, and were shot dead on January 11, 1938. ; ; His main works: ; ; Fizicszeszkije osznovi v biologii, 1930, ; Tyoretycheszkaja biologija, 1935.