He was born inGrenaa on the peninsula ofDjursland inDenmark, the son of Viggo Krogh, a shipbuilder. His mother (born Drechmann) was the daughter of a customs officer in Holstein. Through his mother’s family he claimed "a dash of"Romani blood[2]. Krogh was educated at theAarhus Katedralskole inAarhus. He attended theUniversity of Copenhagen graduating MSc in 1899 and gaining a doctorate PhD in 1903.[12]
Krogh was a pioneer incomparative physiology. He wrote his thesis on the respiration through the skin and lungs infrogs:Respiratory Exchange of Animals, 1915. Later Krogh took on studies of water and electrolytehomeostasis of aquatic animals and he published the books:Osmotic Regulation (1939) andComparative Physiology of Respiratory Mechanisms (1941). He contributed more than 200 research articles in international journals. He was a constructor of scientific instruments of which several had considerable practical importance, such as thespirometer and the apparatus for measuringbasal metabolic rate.
Krogh began lecturing in theUniversity of Copenhagen in 1908 and in 1916 was promoted to full professor, becoming the head of the first laboratory for animalphysiology (zoophysiology) at the university.[13]
In the 1930s, Krogh worked with two other Nobel prizewinners, the radiochemistGeorge de Hevesy and the physicistNiels Bohr on the permeability of membranes toheavy water and radioactiveisotopes, and together, they managed to obtain Denmark's firstcyclotron for experiments on animal and plant physiology as well as in dental and medical work.[13]
In 1922, August Krogh went on a lecture tour to North America after receiving the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. During this tour, he and his wifeMarie, a doctor who was herself suffering from atype 2 diabetes, visited Toronto where the scientistsFrederick Banting,Charles Best andJohn Macleod had just succeeded in manufacturing active insulin. Krogh received permission to manufacture insulin in the Nordic countries and joined forces withHans Christian Hagedorn, a physician specialising in diabetes, to start the production of insulin in Denmark. This led to the establishment of Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium company in 1923.[11][17]
In 1925, brothers Harald andThorvald Pedersen, who were former employees of Nordisk, formed their own company, Novo Terapeutisk Laboratorium. Novo and Nordisk competed until they merged in 1989 to becomeNovo Nordisk A/S.[3]
He marriedMarie Krogh (née Jørgensen, 1874–1943) in 1905. She was a renowned scientist in her own right and much of August Krogh's work was carried out in close collaboration with her.[10]
August and Marie had four children, the youngest of whom,Bodil, was born in 1918. She too was a physiologist, and became the first woman president of theAmerican Physiological Society in 1975.[18] Bodil married another eminent physiologist,Knut Schmidt-Nielsen.[19][20]
Torkel Weis-Fogh, an eminent pioneer on the study ofinsect flight, was a student of August Krogh's. Together they wrote a classic paper on that subject in 1951.[21]
Krogh's name is preserved in two items now named for him:
Krogh's principle, that "for... a large number of problems there will be some animal of choice, or a few such animals, on which it can be most conveniently studied."[24]
He via his book,The Anatomy and Physiology of Capillaries, popularized the false belief that if you were to lay out all the blood vessels from a human body they would reach 100,000 km in length. He made false assumptions about cappilary density while also using a hypothetical body that weighed 140 kg with 50 kg of pure muscle, an unrealistic physique, to get his round figure of 100,000 km. Recent finding suggest that the actual figure is somewhere between 9,000–19,000 km.[25]
Larsen, E. H. (2001). "August Krogh and the laboratory of animal physiology situated at Ny Vestergade 11".Ugeskrift for Laeger.163 (51):7240–7248.PMID11797555.
Kardel, T. (1999). "About the seven little devils who changed physiology. August and Marie Krogh on pulmonary gas exchange".Ugeskrift for Laeger.161 (51):7112–7116.PMID10647306.
Schmidt-Nielsen, Bodil,August and Marie Krogh. Lives in science, American Physiological Society, New York - Oxford 1995, pp. 295
Schmidt-Nielsen, B. (1984). "August and Marie Krogh and respiratory physiology".Journal of Applied Physiology: Respiratory, Environmental and Exercise Physiology.57 (2):293–303.doi:10.1152/jappl.1984.57.2.293.PMID6381437.
Poulsen, J. E. (1975). "The impact of August Krogh on the insulin treatment of diabetes and our present status".Acta Medica Scandinavica. Supplementum.578:7–14.doi:10.1111/j.0954-6820.1975.tb06497.x.PMID1098401.
Dejours, P. (1975). "August Krogh and the physiology of respiration".Scandinavian Journal of Respiratory Diseases.56 (6):337–346.PMID769148.
Kenez, J. (1965). "The Capillaries and Krogh".Orvosi Hetilap.106:177–178.PMID14275297.
^"Deaths of C. M. Wenyon, Clifford Dobell and A. Krogh".Comptes rendus des séances de la Société de biologie et de ses filiales.144 (3–4):160–1. 1950.PMID15420871.
^"August Krogh (1874-1949) the physiologist's physiologist".JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association.199 (7):496–497. 1967.doi:10.1001/jama.199.7.496.PMID5335475.
^Larsen, E. H. (2007). "August Krogh (1874-1949): 1920 Nobel Prize".Ugeskrift for Laeger.169 (35): 2878.PMID17877986.
^Sulek, K. (1967). "Nobel prize for August Krogh in 1920 for his discovery of regulative mechanism in the capillaries".Wiadomosci Lekarskie.20 (19): 1829.PMID4870667.
^Bernard, Claude.Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale, J.B. Baillière et Fils, Libraires de L'Académie Impériale de Médecine, 1865. pp. 400
