Edwin Goldmann

Edwin Goldmann, born in 1862 and died in 1913, was a biomedical researcher and surgeon, most famous for first characterizing the blood-brain barrier. His mentor Paul Ehrlich was studying staining for his bacteriological work by injecting aniline dyes into several species of animal. Most of the anatomy stained equally well, but brain tissue showed less staining in many species. Goldmann found that when the dye trypan blue was injected directly into the central nervous system instead of into the other organs, the brain stained as well as the other organs, but the stain did not travel to the rest of the body. This suggested a compartmentalization between the cerebrospinal fluid and the vasculature of the rest of the body. The Berlin physician Max Lewandowsky had hypothesized such a barrier in 1900, before Goldmann's empirical evidence. Goldmann died of liver cancer in Freiburg in August 1913.