BOOKS. Beatrice Maier Anner (BMA) presents historical accounts of her scientific work on the cellular sodium pump as well as about her enlarged family. The latter comprises a well-known ancestor in the paternal line: Gustav Maier, a sponsor of the young Albert Einstein at Zurich in 1895. He had designated the 16 year old young man a “prodigy” in a letter to Albin Herzog, the rector of the Zurich Polytechnical School (today ETH), being thereby the first person to officially recognize the genius of Albert Einstein. Then, he assisted him for studying physics at the ETH and later, most importantly, to become a Swiss citizen in 1900, a crucial step for the young stateless man. Gustav Maier from Ulm, and his spouse Regina born Friedlaender were indeed close friends of Hermann and Pauline Einstein-Koch, the parents of Albert. The friendship between the two families continued in the next generation, when the son of Gustav Maier, the psychiatrist Hans Wolfgang Maier, director of the University Clinic Burghölzli at Zurich, assisted the youngest son of Albert Einstein, the medical student Eduard Einstein in his disease. Gustav Maier was a banker at Ulm and Frankfurt; then he moved to Switzerland in 1892 to become a social reformer, ethicist, pacifist and writer.
There is also a historical book about the maternal line of the family: the Albert Meierhofer family, originating in the rustic vineyard village of Weiach in the canton of Zurich, and living later in the village of Turgi in the canton of Aargau, where the grandfather Albert Meierhofer of BMA had created a factory of bronze material, the BAG, together with its own hydro-electric power station. His spouse, Marie Meierhofer-Lang was a well-known artistic painter; a first biography of her is available in the section SHOP of this website. Their oldest daughter was Marie Meierhofer, MD and PhD honoris causa, an internationally known child psychiatrist, now represented by the Marie Meierhofer Institute (mmi.ch) at Zurich; she had made her doctoral thesis with Hans Wolfgang Maier as her supervisor, where her younger sister Emmi, the mother of Beatrice had met Gerhart Maier, one of the three sons of Hans Wolfgang Maier. Emmi’s life at the shadow of her famous sister is also illustrated in a book. Taken together, the books present a unique view into German and Swiss family history in the 19th and 20th century, together with an equally interesting historical account of forefront scientific research on a cellular biomotor, the sodium pump, which is at the origin of life.
SHOP. Beatrice Maier Anner has transcribed the books of her great-grandfather Gustav Maier into the computer in both the original German version and then machine-translated to English. The transcribed books are sold in the Shop section of this website."
