Ekkehard Kallee

As a university professor and doctor for nuclear medicine, he was Head of the Radionuclide Laboratory of the University Hospital for Internal Medicine in Tübingen, until he became an emeritus in 1987. He was a Member of the European Thyroid Association, the German Association for Endocrinology and the German Association for Internal Medicine.

He married the pedagogue and later social pedagogue Barbara Kallee, née Weigmann, in 1965 and had with her one son, Stephan Kallee. In his spare time he maintained two Suabian meadow orchards in Ammerbuch, and arranged regularly an annual hiking tour with his dental medicine students to these. As a consequence, his brandies and liquors, which were branded with the Latin slogan ex hortis manibusque Kallee (from Kallee's gardens and hands) became well known within the student community.

He published already in 1954 two German articles about the detection method with I-marked insulin. By taking autoradiographs of capillary electrophoresis strips he could detect down to 10 gram I-marked insulin. He examined serums of humans, rats and guinea pigs and noted that these varied in their capability, to reduce the specific adsorption of veal insulin in filtration paper. Human serums were better suited for the specific insulin detection method than rat or guinea pig serums at the time, because they showed the characteristic I-marked insulin bands only, when non-radioactive carrier-insulin was added. In this field of research one half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was given to Rosalyn Sussman Yalow in 1977 for the development of radioimmunological methods for the detection of peptide hormones. She collaborated over 22 years in a scientific partnership with Solomon Aaron Berson, who would have shared the Nobel Prize with her and Ekkeard Kallee, if he had survived until the prize giving ceremony.

Ekkehard Kallee determined from 1952 to 1959 the principles of the reversibility of protein adsorption together with his colleagues G. Seybold, J. Wollensak, W. Oppermann and H. Ott by conducting experiments on die adsorption of serum proteins. The research team's idea about the passive transport of protein-bound substances was triggered by the medical examination of patients with disorders caused by a lack of albumin.

Ekkehard Kallee attended from 1932 the Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium in Stuttgart, where he learned Latin and Ancient Greek but comparatively few natural sciences. During World War II he was from 1940 to 1945 a paramedic and subsequently held in custody in a French prisoner-of-war camp in Bad Niedernau for half a year. He studied medicine and graduated in 1950 at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and joined the student fraternity Tübinger Königsgesellschaft Roigel only at a very late stage. He wrote his doctoral thesis from 1947 to 1950 at Carl Martius and Adolf Butenandt about Experiments on the chemical synthesis of an organophosphate of citric acid (Versuche zur Darstellung eines Phosphorsäure-Esters der Citronensäure). The experiments themselves did not have positive results, but Ekkehard Kallee made very interesting observations, with which he could contradict the earlier conclusions of two chemists by acribic efforts.

Ekkehard Kallee (born 30 January 1922, Feuerbach - 11 December 2012, Tübingen) was a German university professor and doctor for nuclear medicine.