Uexküll, J. von

Basic Biographical Information

Jakob Johann von Uexküll was born on September 8, 1864, at Keblas, Estonia, on the estate of his aristocratic German family with long-standing historical ties to the Baltic region (Kull 2001). He attended the Domschule in Reval (now, Tallin) before entering the University of Dorpat (Estonia) in 1884 to study zoology. Receiving a cand.zool. degree in 1889, he moved to the Institute of Physiology at the University of Heidelburg (Germany) to study research methods under Wilhelm Kühne, the noted German physiologist and successor to von Helmholtz. Following Kühne’s unexpected death in 1890 and freed by his family’s considerable wealth, Uexküll decided to pursue research as an independent scholar and author. Until the mid-1920s, he worked in Heidelberg and, during the summers from 1892 to 1902, the Zoological Station in Naples, Italy. His discoveries involving the neuromuscular functioning of invertebrate marine mammals led to the grant of an honorary...