Oskar Minkowski

Oskar Minkowski (1858 to 1931) was a German physician and physiologist who held a professorship at the University of Breslau and is most famous for his research on diabetes. He was born in Aleksotas in the Kingdom of Poland into a Jewish merchant family, later converting to Christianity, and he was the brother of the mathematician Hermann Minkowski and the father of the astrophysicist Rudolph Minkowski. Working with Josef von Mering at the University of Strasbourg, he performed the operation in a landmark 1889 study in which removing the pancreas from dogs induced diabetes, and he recognised that the symptoms of the dogs were those of diabetes. The experiment showed that the pancreas holds regulators of blood sugar, supplied a model for studying the disease and led other investigators toward the discovery of insulin. The European Association for the Study of Diabetes awards an annual Minkowski Prize to a younger investigator in his honour.