Agnes Ullmann

Agnes Ullmann
Born	1928 Rumänien
Citizenship	French
Bildung	Budapest University
Awards	Robert Koch Medal (2002)
Scientific career
Fields	microbiology
Institutions	Institut Pasteur

Agnes Ullmann (born 1928 in Romania) is a French microbiologist.

Biography

Ullmann received her doctorate in microbiology from the University of Budapest. After a research visit to Institut Pasteur in 1958/59 working with Jacques Monod, she moved to France in 1960 with the support of Monod, who smuggled her and her husband over the Austria/Hungary border in a Hungarian caravan . With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation she went to the laboratory of Monod at the Institut Pasteur, where she remained for the rest of her career. There she became a professor, laboratory director and in 1982 a member of the Board of Directors.

Ullmann initially dealt with the effects of antibiotics at the Institut Pasteur and was able to elucidate, inter alia, the mode of action of streptomycin (as an inhibitor of protein synthesis in bacteria). She also studied the effect of Second Messenger cAMP in the bacterial cell. In 1967 she showed that cAMP reverses catabolite repression in the bacterium E. coli . Later, she discovered another factor that boosts catabolite repression (catabolite modulator factor, or CMF).

Ullmann subsequently dealt with the mode of action of the whooping cough pathogen and its toxin. She showed that the toxin increases the cAMP production in the host cell and thus disturbs their metabolism. The ability of the toxin to provide other molecules with access to the attacked host cell also helped her to develop vaccines by coupling the genetically engineered whooping cough toxin with antigenic fragments that were to be immunized against.

In 2002 she received the Robert Koch Medal. She is an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

In 1978, with André Lwoff, she published a collection of essays by Jacques Monod and she published two anthologies in memory of him.

Ullmann has been a French citizen since 1966.

Works

• Editor: Origins of Molecular Biology - a tribute to Jacques Monod , [D. American Society for Microbiology]], Washington D.C., 2003 (French original 1980)
• Editor with Ernesto Quagliarello, Giorgio Bernardi From Enzyme Adaptation to Natural Philosophy: Heritage from Jacques Monod , Elsevier 1987 (Conference in Trani 1986)
• Editor with Antoine Danchin, Francis Gasser (Pasteur Institute): Régulation de l'expression génétique: rôle de l 'AMP cyclique' ', Paris, Hermann 1986

Web links

• Kurth, Reinhard (2002). "Laudatio für Frau Prof. Dr. Agnes Ullmann" [Commendation for Prof. Agnes Ullman]. robert-koch-stiftung.de (in German). Archived from the original on 1 October 2007. Retrieved 14 October 2018. {{cite web}}: |archive-date= / |archive-url= timestamp mismatch; 10 October 2007 suggested (help); Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)