Alexander E. Braunstein
Alexander Yevseyevich Braunstein (1902–1986) was a Soviet biochemist. He is best known for his co-discovery, along with Maria Kritzman, of enzymatic transamination and its dependence on vitamin B6. Braunstein and American scientist Esmond Emerson Snell have been cited as the "fathers of vitamin B6". Early life and education Braunstein was born in Kharkiv (then Kharkov), Ukraine in 1902. His father was an ophthalmologist. In his early education he displayed a facility for learning languages, became interested in studying chemistry, and eventually began study in medicine in 1920 at the Kharkov State Medical Institute. He then moved to Moscow and received his Ph.D. under the supervision of Vladimir Engelgardt in 1928. Academic career Braunstein spent his early scientific career at the People's Commissariat of Health. In 1936, he moved to the A. M. Gorky Institute of Experimental Medicine. In 1945, after the end of World War II, he assumed leadership of a laboratory at the Institute of Biological and Medical Chemistry, under the auspices of the then-new USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. In 1959, when his former Ph.D. advisor Engelhardt founded a new Institute of Radiation and Physico-Chemical Biology (later the Institute of Molecular Biology), Braunstein headed a laboratory there. Research