Konrad Lorenz

Born on 7 November 1903, Lorenz was the second and last child of Emma Lorenz and Dr. Adolf Lorenz, a distinguished and wealthy orthopedic surgeon. Growing up in comfortable surroundings at the family home in the village of Altenberg, on the outskirts of Vienna, the young Lorenz was allowed to pursue his enthusiasms as an animal lover. His interest in animals and evolution as an adolescent led him to think of becoming a zoologist or paleontologist, but his father wanted him to be a physician instead. After one semester of premedical studies at Columbia University, Lorenz enrolled in 1923 as a medical student in the Second Anatomical Institute of the University of Vienna. There he came under the influence of the distinguished comparative anatomist Ferdinand Hochstetter, who taught him how comparative anatomists use physical structures to reconstruct evolutionary lineages (Figure 1). Lorenz’s receipt of his doctorate of medicine in 1928 seems to have satisfied his father’s desire that he receive a medical education. With his MD in hand, he enrolled at the University of Vienna’s Zoological Institute, receiving his PhD in zoology in 1933 for a study of bird flight andwing form. In the meantime, he had continued to raise birds and observe their behavior, and his observations had brought him to the attention of Germany’s leading ornithologists, Erwin Stresemann and Oskar Heinroth. They, along with Hochstetter and the psychologist, Karl Bühler, at the University of Vienna, encouraged Lorenz to pursue a career combining zoology and animal psychology. His talents in this regard were displayed in a series of papers he published on bird behavior, culminating in his path-breaking ‘Kumpan,’ monograph of 1935, entitled ‘Der Kumpan in der Umwelt des Vogels: der Artgenosse als auslösendes Moment sozialer Verhaltungsweisen’ (‘The Companion in the Bird’s World: Fellow Members of the Species as Releasers of Social Behavior’). Lorenz’s rise in scientific visibility was not followed immediately, however, by gainful academic employment. As of 1937, his only position was that of Dozent (unpaid lecturer) in Bühler’s Psychological Institute. By then, he had already been married for a decade (to Margarethe Gebhardt, his child sweetheart), and he had two children (Thomas, b. 1928; Agnes, b. 1930) (a third child, Dagmar, would be born in 1941). He and his family lived with his parents in Altenberg. He came to fear that his chances for professional advancement in Catholic Austria were slim,