Bergmann was born in
Fürth,
Bavaria,
Germany on February 12, 1886, the seventh child of coal wholesalers Salomon and Rosalie Bergmann. Bergmann started studying Biology at the
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, but lectures by
Adolf von Baeyer captured his interest and eventually persuaded him to switch to
Organic Chemistry. He continued his chemical studies at the
Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, where he was taught by
Emil Fischer. After receiving his PhD under the supervision of Ignaz Bloch
de] in 1911 for his thesis on
acyl(polysulfides), he became the assistant to Fischer at the University of Berlin, where he stayed until Fischer's death in 1919. He received his
habilitation in 1921. In 1922 Bergmann was made the first director of the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Leather Research in
Dresden, which was created in 1921 and from which the
Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry descends. It was there that he worked with his former doctoral student,
Leonidas Zervas, who eventually rose to vice-director of the institute and briefly succeeded Bergmann as director. In the early 1930s, the two scientists developed the
Bergmann-Zervas carbobenzoxy method for the synthesis of polypeptides, which started the field of controlled
peptide chemical synthesis and remained the dominant method in it for the next 20 years. Bergmann and Zervas gained international academic fame as a result. Since 1980, the Max-Bergmann-Kreis (MBK) company of German peptide chemists awards the Bergmann golden medal for peptide science, with the first medal given to Zervas. In 2002 the Max Bergmann Center was created in Dresden. ==References==