Despite finding international fame as one of Germany’s most renowned scientists in the first half of the 20th century, Heinrich Otto Wieland always shied away from the limelight, so the man now regarded as the father of modern biochemistry would probably have approved of the low key manner in which his 1927 Nobel prize was sold in April.

Auctioned off by a small memorabilia company in Los Angeles amongst a random collection of showbiz items such as curtain costumes from the Sound of Music, Wieland’s medal received just a single bid, raising a princely $395,000.

Few today will recognise Wieland’s name, but his work played a key role in defining our modern understanding of metabolism and the structure of steroids, vitally important biological molecules which are the precursors of hormones such as testosterone and oestrogen. Understanding steroid structure eventually led to the development of drugs such as the contraceptive pill.

It was Wieland’s work on bile acids, a fiendishly complex family of steroids, which won him his Nobel Prize. At the time their clinical relevance was not fully understood but we now know that bile acids are involved in vital bodily functions ranging from digestion to absorption of fat, while malfunctions in their mechanisms of action have been linked to increased cholesterol and heart disease, the development of gallstones, and even the onset of colorectal cancer.

“We can now see how his work has led to many medications for a variety of diseases and with the advance of genetic research we know that steroid hormones have huge consequences in the cell,” says Wieland’s grandson, of the same name, himself a Professor of Medicine at the University of Freiburg. “Testosterone alone influences about 350 different genes. But back then it was the skill involved in finding the chemical structure which was acknowledged by the Nobel committee. The bile acids were a very complicated puzzle and the methods available at the time were extremely basic. There were none of the advanced machines we can rely on today. Instead they had to observe chemical reactions, see what happened and draw conclusions.”

In many ways, Wieland was the last of his kind, chemists who were able to command an almost universal knowledge of their entire field. By the time his academic career was ended by the flurry of Allied bombs which destroyed his laboratory in 1945, the breakthroughs made over the past three decades had led to increased specialization and the growth of an entirely new field, biochemistry. This would captivate the world eight years later when James Watson and Francis Crick made their landmark discovery of the structure of DNA.

Wieland operated in an era when academic research was only just beginning to be bankrolled by the chains of pharmaceutical companies which had emerged at the end of the 19th century. Rather than being driven by the search for new drug targets, science was often focused on solving fairly abstract questions. Wieland himself was fascinated by natural substances, from the pigments which made up the colours of butterfly wings, to the lethal poison of the world’s most deadly mushroom Amanita phalloides.

But it meant that well-paid university positions were still few and far between, and Wieland conducted much of the work which would eventually win him the Nobel prize, in relative poverty, unable to afford to marry his wife for many years. He was 48 when he received his first well-paid job in 1925, the prestigious position of Professor of Chemistry at the University of Munich. He had been nominated by the previous incumbent, a famous chemist called Richard Willstätter.

Willstätter was a brilliant scientist who won the Nobel prize in 1915 for discovering the structure of chlorophyll, but he was Jewish and despite his stature he found Munich in the early 1920s an increasingly toxic world.

“Willstatter had a fine feeling for German society and anti-Semitism and even though the Nazis had not yet come to power in 1924, he anticipated what was coming,” Wieland’s grandson says. “Since he could afford it, he retired and later emigrated to Switzerland. No one could understand him at the time, but he just said ‘I don’t like it anymore’ and refused all offers to stay.”

Wieland always Willstätter in very high regard, later writing, “I find it agonising how much this poor man suffered throughout his life from these illusions of racial inferiority.” During the 1920s he had developed his own deep disgust for the Nazi party, becoming aware of the impending atrocities from an early stage.

“He always said that if you were an intellectual, well-educated German, you couldn’t fail to notice the type of people the Nazis were,” Wieland’s grandson says. “He couldn’t understand their hatred for the Jews. For him they were just people with a different religion. He didn’t see why all of a sudden they should be facing these problems.”

Wieland was a liberal, free-minded person who was used to doing as he pleased, and as a young man he had rebelled against his strict Protestant upbringing. When his parents did not approve of his choice of wife, he proceeded regardless. They weren’t invited to the wedding, and he then refused to baptise his children.

Despite living in Munich, the centre of the rise of fascism, he became determined to make his own outspoken stance against the Hitler regime, often dropping subtle political jokes into his lectures.

During one public talk in 1935, he was discussing the large amounts of phosphorus contained in the brain’s lipids. “These days Germany has become a country lacking in phosphorus,” he quipped, to the initial shock and then applause of his audience.

He had great distaste for the official ruling that the fascist salute should be mandatory. During a meeting, one of Wieland’s new students rushed into the room declaring, “Heil Hitler”.

Wieland instantly apologized, “I am sorry. This young man just arrived yesterday. In a few days he will have learnt how to greet correctly.”

On finding that a bronze bust of Willstätter, placed in the lobby of the university building, had been destroyed during Kristallnacht in 1938, Wieland promptly ordered the destruction of his own bust, sculpted after his Nobel prize award ceremony in 1927. It was a deliberate show of solidarity with Willstätter which could have seen him arrested or threatened with a lawsuit, but Wieland had already risked far more both secretly and publically in support of the Jews.

“To study chemistry at Munich, you had to pass a strict entrance exam and he invited a group of Jewish students to sit it at his house,” Wieland’s grandson says. “At the end, he wrote down that they had passed, wrote them each a letter of recommendation, gave them a sum of his own money and said, ‘Now you disappear to the United States.’ And they escaped, and went on to become successful scientists themselves.”

For Jewish students who were unable to escape, Wieland offered places in his laboratory, aware that it was becoming increasingly difficult for them to study. He even went to the authorities personally, insisting that it was imperative to his research efforts that they were allowed to work with him.

“At that time students were extremely vital to any lab as there were no machines, so everything had to be done by hand,” Wieland’s grandson says. “Of course, it was not a problem to get students but not many Nazis were in Wieland’s intake. It was quite open that he was anti-Nazi but as he had a Nobel prize, he felt it was manageable to have that stance. But you never know just how close he was to being in danger.”

From 1938 onwards, the situation became progressively more desperate for Jews in Munich. After witnessing deportations to concentration camps, Wieland began to hide Jewish students in his laboratory, in the cellar and the storage rooms.

With his laboratory under constant surveillance, Wieland knew that if discovered, he faced arrest and possibly worse. A Munich professor called Kurt Huber was executed in 1943 for his involvement in the White Rose resistance group which anonymously distributed anti-Nazi graffiti and leaflets throughout the city.

“I think he felt that compelled to act,” Wieland’s grandson says. “He was already 60 in 1937, all his children were already had their jobs, nobody really depended on him anymore and so he could risk much more than some others.”

Two of Wieland’s own students were involved in the White Rose movement – Marie-Luise Jahn and an Austrian of Jewish heritage called Hans Leipelt. When both were arrested in late 1943, Wieland helped select defense lawyers, organize potential plea bargains and when Leipelt’s trial began in late 1944, he travelled to the public tribunal where he refused to perform the fascist salute and testified on his student’s behalf, arguing at length for his exoneration.

It was ultimately in vain. Leipelt was executed in January 1945. “Whoever is caught by this murderous machinery is lost,” Wieland commented afterwards.

While Wieland was certainly not alone in his steadfast and very public opposition to the Nazi regime, he was in the minority among German scientists. The common belief was that academics should remain detached from politics, and anything which could prove troublesome or disruptive for the university and the autonomy of scientific research.

While he won lasting recognition and respect for his work, which earned him virtually every major scientific honour going, perhaps Wieland’s refusal to back down from his beliefs even during the height of Nazi oppression, remains his greatest legacy.

As he wrote in 1938, “By 1933 I had already decided to follow a strategy of resistance that could be carried right to the end.”