Max Kleiber(4 January 1893–5 January 1976)[1]was a Swiss agricultural biologist, born and educated inZürich,Switzerland.

Kleiber graduated from the SwissFederal Institute of Technologyas an Agricultural Chemist in 1920, earned theScDdegree in 1924, and became aPrivatdozentafter publishing his thesis,The Energy Concept in the Science of Nutrition.

Kleiber joined the Animal Husbandry Department of theUniversity of California, Davis(UC Davis) in 1929 to constructrespiration chambersand conduct research on energy metabolism in animals. Among his many important achievements, two are especially noteworthy. In 1932, he came to the conclusion that the ¾ power of body weight was the most reliable basis for predicting thebasal metabolic rate(BMR) of animals and for comparing nutrient requirements among animals of different sizes. He also provided the basis for the conclusion that total efficiency of energy utilization is independent of body size. These concepts and several others fundamental for understanding energy metabolism are discussed in Kleiber's book,The Fire of Life,published in 1961 and subsequently translated into German, Polish, Spanish, and Japanese.

He is credited with the description of the ratio of metabolism to body mass, which becameKleiber's law.Kleiber's lawis the observation that, for the vast majority of animals, an animal'smetabolic ratescales to the34power of the animal's mass.[2]More recently, Kleiber's law has also been shown to apply inplants,[3]suggesting that Kleiber's observation is much more general.

Books

edit

1961: The Fire of Life: An Introduction to Animal Energetics

Awards

edit

1954 Guggenheim Fellowshipfor Natural Sciences (US & Canada), inMolecular and Cellular Biology[4][5]

References

edit
  1. ^"Biographical sketch (with photo) of Max Kleiber".UC Davis.Archived fromthe originalon 2008-02-08.
  2. ^Kleiber M (January 1932)."Body size and metabolism".Hilgardia.6(11): 315–353.doi:10.3733/hilg.v06n11p315.
  3. ^Enquist BJ, Brown JH, West GB (1998). "Allometric scaling of plant energetics and population density".Nature.395(10): 163–165.doi:10.1038/25977.
  4. ^"Max Kleiber".gf.org.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.Retrieved2023-08-02.
  5. ^"Guggenheim grants given two S.F. men".The San Francisco Examiner.San Francisco, California, USA. 1954-05-03. p. 10.Retrieved2022-11-14– via newspapers.
edit