Frédéric Alphonse Musculus, born on July 16, 1829, in Soultz-sous-Forêts and died on May 26, 1888, in Strasbourg, was a French chemist.
Career.
Son of the pharmacist of Soultz-sous-Forêts, he himself became a pharmacist. Still young, he frequented the laboratory of Boussingault in Paris. He studied starch, became interested in the production of beer and invented an alcoholometer based on capillarity. He was chief pharmacist at the Strasbourg hospital and chaired the "Society of sciences, agriculture and arts of Lower Alsace". He did research in collaboration with members of the laboratory of Felix Hoppe-Seyler.
He showed in 1876 that the ammoniacal fermentation of urine is due to a "soluble ferment" (enzyme) which can act in the absence of the living organism to which "one" then attributed the causal role. Pasteur, who had identified the living organism in question ("organized ferment") and attributed to it the role of agent of fermentation, was convinced by the experience of Musculus, but insisted on the fact that the "soluble ferment" was a production of the "organized ferment". The discovery of Musculus (the fact that a fermentation is only indirectly caused by a living organism and that it is possible to obtain this fermentation in the absence of this living organism, with the help of non-living substances that it secreted) was, in the particular case of the ammoniacal fermentation of urine, the confirmation of a general conjecture that Moritz Traube in 1858 and Berthelot in 1860 had formulated about all fermentations and that Buchner would demonstrate in 1897 in the case of alcoholic fermentation. The enzyme discovered by Musculus was later called "urease".
Frédéric Musculus is buried in the Saint-Gall cemetery in Strasbourg (Koenigshoffen).
Publications.
Without claiming to be exhaustive: