APPENDIX B

Pioneer Biographies
of the Indian Period from 1947

Hermann Lehmann (1910-1985)

Hermann Lehmann was born 1910 in the Germany of the Kaiser, the son of a prosperous German-Jewish family. He first attended school in Halle until 1923 when his father's business, as so many businesses at that time, collapsed during post-war economic chaos and hyper-inflation. The family moved to Dresden where Hermann's education continued somehow. At the famous 700-year-old Gymnasium zum Heiligen Kreuz at Dresden he learnt French, Greek, Latin and Hebrew, but, as he was to note regretfully later, no English. Against the wishes of his family (who would have preferred him to study history) he started at medical school in 1928 at the southern German University of Freiburg. He soon moved to Frankfurt am Main where his uncle's family lived and where he passed the preclinical examination in 1930. He continued his studies in Berlin and completed them at Heidelberg in the fateful year 1933. By then, Hitler had come to power and the position of Jews deteriorated so alarmingly that the young doctor could not take his final examination at Heidelberg. With the support of his courageous Prof. Moro Lehmann did continue to work at the Heidelberg laboratory while submitting his thesis on gastric secretion to the Swiss University of Basle where it was accepted it in 1934.

Newly-qualified Dr. Lehmann could not practice in Switzerland because he lacked the necessary Swiss state qualification. At that time, German private institutions, hospitals and universities were not yet formally forbidden to employ Jews and he was thus able to obtain an unpaid position as assistant to the famous biochemist Prof. Meyerhof - himself a Jew - at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute. Dr. Lehmann himself recalled later that all of Meyerhof's staff was anti-Nazi. In this unlikely shelter from the gathering hurricane outside, Dr. Lehmann conducted his research and published his first scientific papers. Through an exchange agreement that Prof. Meyerhof had with Sir F.G. Hopkins, professor of biochemistry at Cambridge University, Lehmann could briefly go to Cambridge where he made such an impression that Sir Hopkins is said to have asked him to leave his lab coat hanging behind the door where it would be ready for him on return. Despite the darkening situation there, Dr. Lehmann went back to Germany and continued his biochemical work there. He attended an international Congress of Biochemistry in the Soviet Union where he met many famous scientists, including the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. Prof. Needham from Cambridge was also there and confirmed that Dr. Lehmann would indeed be welcome at Cambridge. On return to Germany, Dr. Lehmann found himself falsely accused of having attended at communist trade union congress. Germany had become a very dangerous place for a Jewish doctor and it was high time for him to leave. In 1936 Dr. Lehmann went to Cambridge.

He arrived virtually penniless but during his earlier stay he had not only impressed people, he had made genuine friends. Prof. Needham and his wife were especially helpful and arranged for a small grant from a fund for Jewish refugees. Dr. Lehmann was advised to take an English university degree and he registered for a Cambridge PhD. While all this was going on, he also brought his half-brother and two sisters out of Germany. That he failed to extricate his step-mother was to remain a matter of great sadness to him - she died at Auschwitz.

Pulling on the lab coat that had been waiting behind Sir Hopkin's laboratory door, Dr. Lehmann settled into Cambridge and began to work. His social life was, at first, centered on other refugees but as his command of the English language improved, English acquaintances increasingly turned into friends. The Needhams continued to be most helpful and left their house to Lehmann whenever they were away. It was in their house that he met and impressed the people that later made membership of Christ's College possible, an most unusual distinction for a young refugee.

Working hard, often right through weekends, he completed his thesis Aspects of Carbohydrate Metabolism in the Absence of Molecular Oxygen and was not only awarded his PhD in 1938 but also received the Darwin Prize at Christ's College. A Beit Memorial Fellowship allowed him to continue work undisturbed by financial worries until 1940.

After the military reverses suffered by the British on the Continent in 1940, Dr. Lehmann along with most other German and Austrian refugees was interned in May of that year. Sir Hopkins and others used their influence to prize him lose in October, just in time for the new term at Cambridge. Dr. Lehmann wanted to contribute to the war effort and obtained a post at an Essex hospital. It was there that he met his future wife: while both were wearing gas masks, he firmly directed the young lady's ambulance into the nearest wall. The good doctor and the highly talented musician Benigna married shortly thereafter.

In 1943 Dr. Lehmann obtained a commission in the medical corps and was posted to India, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. It was as Assistant Director for Pathology, Northeast India Command, that he was asked if he knew and could recommend a certain Captain Lehmann who had applied for naturalization as a British subject. Needless to say, Dr. Lehmann had no trouble confirming that he knew Captain Lehmann very well and that he though him entirely suitable.

Lt.Col. Lehmann was demobilized in 1946 and arrived back in England in early 1947 to meet his wife and daughter. His wife's family was a large one and most supportive. The next move took him and his little family to Uganda where he worked as a Colonial Medical Research Fellow for malnutrition and anemia with the Makerere College. It was there that he first interested himself in abnormal hemoglobin and sickle-cell anemia - it would soon become the scientific passion of his life. All this happened when the nature of the abnormality and the connection between the sickling trait and the parasite Malaria falciparum was slowly becoming understood. It was an exciting time to work in tropical Africa and Dr. Lehmann made the most of it.

In 1950 Dr. Lehmann and his little family returned to England. Taking up a position at the District General Hospital, Pembury, Kent, he had to undertake the whole range of clinical-pathological work. Despite the multitude of demands on his time, he managed to carry on with his research in the sickling trait. In 1951 he was appointed first Senior Lecturer in Chemical Pathology at St. Bartholomew's ("Bart") Hospital, London's oldest teaching hospital, and in 1959 was promoted Reader. He could now expand and deepen his research despite considerable shortcomings in equipment, staff and funding that when he left in 1963 to become University Biochemist at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, he had acquired fame and reputation as a leading scientist in this field.

It is said that Dr. Lehmann's work in hemoglobin at this time literally became airborne. His enthusiasm for new discoveries in the field was such that he would fly to any part of the world to investigate even if it did not endear him to some members of Bart's more earthbound staff. One of Dr. Lehmann's expeditions took him to the Veddoid people of the Nilgiri hills of southern India. Behind it was speculation about an ancient link between India and Africa. The Veddoid tribes of southern India were chosen by Dr. Lehmann as the group in which a search for African blood features (such as the presence of the sickle-cell trait) appeared most likely to confirm or refute this hypothesis. Seven south Indian communities were investigated and three of them came up positives: the Irulas had 30%, the Badagas 8.40% and the Todas 3.3% positive results. It was the first time ever that the "African" sickling trait had been found in India. As usual, Dr. Lehmann got on as well with the locals as with the Indian scientists accompanying his expedition. One of the Indian doctors, Dr. Sukumaran, went so far as to call Dr. Lehmann his "guru" - high praise indeed in India. Dr. Sukumaran also has fond memories of the Lehmann's home life which consisted of lively discussions on science, music, an exchange of experiences abroad, affectionate inquiries about families, good food and a comfortable stay. This author can confirm that such delightful traditions are still being kept up to the full today at the cozy Cambridge home of Dr. Lehmann's widow. May they continue so for many more years!

The Indian officer who had replaced Dr. Lehmann as Assistant Director of Pathology in 1945 had, in the meantime, become newly independent India's Director of Army Research at New Delhi. It was this officer and the Italian scientist Lidio Cipriani then working in the Andamans who invited Dr. Lehmann to visit the otherwise inaccessible Andamans in 1953 with a view to establish whether there were any similarities between the Andamanese and other pygmy people. No such similarities were found which reduced Dr. Lehmann's interest in the islanders somewhat, even though confirmation of the absence of sickling was as important as would have been its opposite. Nevertheless, from his point of view, the Andamanese were a disappointment. He did gain a great deal of new microbiological and other data on the Andamanese and opened the way for later investigations by Indian scientists. It is characteristic of the man's incurable scientific curiosity that despite his disappointment he managed to write a description of the Onge that contains much information not found elsewhere. Dr. Lehmann also clearly is responsible for much of the medical information that non-medical Cipriani tended to present as his own. Dr. Lehman's status as a pioneer of Andamanese studies is based firmly on being the first qualified specialist to look at the Andamanese with the tools of modern science. Much influential scientific work on abnormal hemoglobin and other genetically inherited diseases followed but Dr. Lehmann never returned to the subject of the Andamanese.

It was at this time that Dr. Lehmann watched an Onge man furtively bury his hair in the forest. He waited until the man had left and then dug it up again to take with him. He never did anything further with this hair but, first-rate scientist that he was, he did not throw them away. Dr. Lehmann's son, Paul Lehmann, professor of microbiology and immunology at the medical college of Ohio at Toledo, USA, inherited the box containing these hairs hairs and kept them at home - until the geneticist Dr. Hagelberg had need of them. Almost half a century after they had been buried on Little Andaman, these hairs would play their role in establishing a genetic link between the Andamanese and the Khoisan of South Africa.

Ever since 1963 Dr. Lehmann had been University biochemist at Cambridge. In 1967 he was awarded a personal Chair in Clinical Biochemistry in the University of Cambridge Department of Biochemistry. In 1972 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. When an independent department of Clinical Biochemistry was established in 1974 he became its first head. His growing reputation in the rapidly expanding field of hemoglobin research resulted in a steady stream of applicants from all over the world, eager to work in his laboratory. He himself was much sought after as lecturer overseas and as a leading speaker at symposia and conferences. An increasing amount of collaborative research explains the large number of publications emanating from his laboratory. Dr. Lehman's humanity and modesty has been characterized by one of his closest collaborators in the 1950s as follows

More almost than anyone else I have known, Hermann accepted everyone as equal (not mentally of course) irrespective of colour, race, religion, nationality and one felt that he was equally at home in any surroundings from a royal palace to a peasant's hovel.

As regards Lehmann's high intelligence, the same collaborator wrote in relation to the discovery of the DNA helix as the carrier of genetic information

Hermann was able to draw upon his unrivalled background in of biochemical knowledge to explain all genetic processes in biochemical terms. He seemed suddenly to gain a mastery of the whole of genetics and henceforth he was to be the leader of all our genetic discussions.

Dr. Lehman's enthusiasm about his subject was legendary and sometimes carried to lengths that those subjected to it sometimes found a trifle inconvenient. A lack of interest in time zones lead to the following incident: when Lehmann called a collaborator overseas at the victim's local time of one in the morning, it took a while before the receiver was lifted and when at last it was, Dr. Lehmann's first words often were "I didn't think you were in." On return from a field trip to China and being asked of his impression of the country he answered that there was a lot more hemoglobin E than he had expected. Most impressive to this author (who has some experience in the ways of Chinese officialdom) was how Dr. Lehmann at 70 had retained his formidable ability to get his own way. On a visit to China in a joint venture organized by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society in 1977, Dr. Lehmann spontaneously wanted to visit outer Mongolia to bleed some of the population there. He wanted to see how common Hb D was in this remote area. The Chinese bureaucracy, always fearful of the unexpected and terrified of the spontaneous, strongly disagreed. The immovable object met the irresistible force - the party went to outer Mongolia.

Dr. Lehmann retired as Professor Emeritus in 1977 but continued his research work until just before his death at Cambridge in 1985.

Early in 2002, Prof. Lehmann's activities in the Andaman islands could still make a contribution to scientific progress: his son (also a professor) could contribute some Onge hair left by his father to a laboratory for DNA analysis.

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Last changed 10 September 2005