Maria-Regina Kula (born 1937): Pioneer of Green Chemistry

From inorganic chemist to biotechnologist: As Director of the Institute of Enzyme Technology at the University of Düsseldorf, Maria-Regina Kula worked on biocatalysts. She received the German Future Prize for her findings in 2002.

Maria-Regina Kula was born in Berlin in March 1937. After completing her Abitur, she initially studied at Berlin’s Humboldt University and then chemistry at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU). She also completed her doctoral thesis at LMU in 1962. In the working group of Egon Wiberg (1901–1976) and Eberhard Amberger (1926–1995), she focused mainly on hydrides and double hydrides. Wiberg, the renowned co-author of the standard work “Textbook of Inorganic Chemistry”, was her doctoral supervisor.

After completing her dissertation, Maria-Regina Kula initially remained at LMU’s Institute of Inorganic Chemistry. She then spent three years, from 1964 to 1967, as a German Research Foundation fellow at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, in the US state of Maryland. As her main area of interest had shifted from inorganic chemistry to the life sciences, after her time in the USA she took up a position as a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen. In 1969, she moved to the Gesellschaft für Molekularbiologische Forschung in Braunschweig as head of department; this became the Gesellschaft für Biotechnologische Forschung in 1976 and the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in 2006. Kula shaped the institution as its scientific director from 1975 to 1979 and remained head of department there until 1985.

In 1979, Maria-Regina Kula completed her habilitation in biochemistry at TU Braunschweig. From 1986 to 2002, she was Professor and Director of the Institute of Enzyme Technology at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, which is located on the grounds of Forschungszentrum Jülich. During this period, her collaboration with biotechnology professors Christian Wandrey (born 1943) and Hermann Sahm (born 1942) was particularly fruitful.

Prof. Kula was particularly fascinated by the catalytic properties of enzymes. She wanted to introduce them as catalysts into the chemical industry and therefore became involved at an early stage in processes for isolating intracellular enzymes on a larger scale. Her expertise in this field received relatively little attention in Germany, but became increasingly important with advances in biotechnology and genetic engineering. Maria-Regina Kula made a name for herself in America through this work, while in Germany she is better known for other achievements, including the development of an enzyme-membrane reactor.

For ten years, she was co-editor for the “Downstream Processing” section of Biotechnology & Bioengineering, the leading journal in biotechnology. For decades, she also co-organised the international Conference “Recovery of Biological Products”. Maria-Regina Kula received several honours for her scientific findings. She was elected a foreign member of the American National Academy of Engineering and received an honorary doctorate from Lund University. In 1983, the professor received the Technology Transfer Prize of the Federal Ministry of Research and Technology for her work on enzyme-membrane reactors. In this field, she collaborated with the company Degussa. The aim was the industrial production of L-amino acids, particularly L-methionine. She has been a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences since March 1995, and in 1997 she was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1st Class.

As the crowning achievement of her scientific Career, at the end of 2002 she received the German Future Prize together with chemist and biotechnologist Martina Pohl (born 1961) for their research into gentle chemistry using biocatalysts. At the beginning of the same year, in March 2002, Maria-Regina Kula became emerita. She has been a member of the GDCh since 1965 and now lives in Munich.

Literature
A. Rolfes: Deutscher Zukunftspreis: Die Hebammen der „Sanften Chemie", Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 November 2002
H. Werner: Geschichte der anorganischen Chemie, Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2017, p. 428