Protein extraction, quantification and purification

Karl Raimund Popper was born in Himmelhof, in the district of Vienna (then in Austria-Hungary) on 28th July 1902. Popper was the son of Siegmund Carl Popper who was a doctor of law at the University of Vienna.⁴ Popper's mother, Jenny Schiff (1864-1938), came from a musical family, and was herself musical. Popper tells us that she played the piano beautifully; music had an important place in Popper's life.⁵ Obviously, both parents, had great influence on him. So did the atmosphere of Vienna of the time.During Popper's early childhood, his parents were prosperous. They lived in a large apartment in an 18th century house in the centre of Vienna, where Popper's

44 father conducted his legal practice. Popper's father had an enormous library, which included many works of philosophy; books were everywhere, Popper tells us, except in the dining room, where stood a concert grand piano. The father, who was more of a scholar than a lawyer⁶ translated the classics, greatly appreciated philosophy, and took a keen interest in social problems. He gave the young Karl numerous opportunities to channel his precocious intelligence; for example, ―the portraits of Schopenhauer and Darwin hanging in his father‘s studio aroused in him a questioning curiosity, even before Karl learned to read.‖⁷ More so, Karl‘s mother passed on to him such a passion for music that between 1920 and 1922 he seriously thought of taking it upon as a career. Even after this idea was abandoned, his love for music did not diminish and indeed was fundamental in the development of his philosophical thinking.⁸ Corroborating on the background influences on Popper, Helfenbein and DeSalle posit that, ―the time and place of Popper‘s birth (Vienna, 1902) may in some part be responsible for Popper‘s broad interests in music, politics, philosophy, and science.‖⁹ Indeed, Popper grew up in an academic gingered and spiced environment which according to him ―was decidedly bookish‖¹⁰ and in no mean measure shaped his academic and political prowess.

As a young boy, Popper was much concerned with the poverty he saw all around him in Vienna. In his Intellectual Autobiography (1975), Popper recounts that:

The sight of abject poverty in Vienna was one of the main problems which agitated me when I was still a small child-so much that it was almost always at the back of my mind. Few people now living in one of the Western democracies know what poverty meant at the beginning of this century: men, women, and children suffering from hunger, cold and hopelessness. But we children could not help. We could do no more than ask for a few coppers to give to some poor people.¹¹

45 Also, the events surrounding the First World War (1914-1918) had tremendous influence on the young Karl.

More so, during this period, he attended the local ―Realgymnasium‖, where he was unhappy with the standards of the teaching. In his autobiography he wrote:

In our famous Austrian secondary schools (called

―Gymnasium‖ and horrible dictum ―Realgymnasium‖) we were wasting our time shockingly… that much of their teaching was boring in the extreme hours and hours of hopeless torture was not new to me… There was just one subject in which we had an interesting and truly inspiring teacher. The subject was mathematics and the name of the Teacher was Philipp Freud.¹²

Popper left school at 16 because of the tedium of the classes, and enrolled at the University of Vienna in 1918. In 1919, Popper became attracted to Marxism and subsequently joined the Association of Socialist School Students. He also became a member of the Social Democratic Workers‘ Party of Austria, which was at that time a party that fully adopted the Marxist ideology.¹³ Eventually, during the street battle in the Hörlgasse where communists organized a demonstration with the intention of freeing communists held in a police station in Vienna; the police opened fire, and some of the demonstrators were killed. Popper became disillusioned by what he saw to be the

"pseudo-scientific" historical materialism of Marx, abandoned the ideology, and remained a supporter of social liberalism throughout his life. This led to the writing of his The Open Society and Its Enemies years later.

Incidentally, Popper worked in street construction for a short amount of time, but was unable to cope with the heavy labour; he then tried his hand at cabinet making while continuing to attend university as a guest student, but was distracted by the intellectual problems that he was working on though he graduated as a journeyman. Popper also worked for the psychologist Adler, and as a social worker concerned with neglected children. In 1922, he finally joined the University as an ordinary student and completed

46 his examination as an elementary teacher in 1924. In 1925, he went to the newly founded Pedagogic Institute and continued studying philosophy and psychology, held informal seminars for fellow students, and duly became qualified to teach physics and mathematics in secondary schools in 1929. Around that time he started courting Josephine Anna Henninger (1906-1985), who later became his wife in 1930.¹⁴ In 1928, he earned a doctorate in psychology, under the supervision of Bühler and Schlick and his dissertation was entitled "Die Methodenfrage der Denkpsychologie" (The question of method in cognitive psychology). Popper became a professional philosopher in 1937. He left Austria for New Zealand where he taught philosophy at Canterbury College, Christchurch between 1937 and 1945. And in 1946 subsequently after the Second World War, he left for England and began to teach in the London School of Economics where he later became a professor of Logic and The Methodology of Science in 1949, more so, he was knighted in 1965.¹⁵ The following are Popper‘s major works:

1. Logic de Forschung (1935) – English translation 2. Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959)

3. The Poverty of Historicism (1944)

4. The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) 5. Conjectures and Refutations (1963) 6. Objective Knowledge (1972)

7. Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (1974)

8. (A joint work with Sir John Eccles) The Self and its Brain (1977) 9. The Open Universe (1982)

10. Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics (1982) 11. Realism and the Aim of Science (1983)

47 Popper‘s reputation and stature as a philosopher of science and social thinker grew enormously until his death on 17th September, 1994 at the age of 91 years.¹⁶