Rainer Schubert-Soldern was born. He was a zoologist, botanist, and paleontologist. During the development of his scientific career, he cultivated an interest in natural philosophy and the philosophy of life, publishing important works on these topics, among them Mechanism and Vitalism: Philosophical Aspects of Biology (1951) and Materie und Leben als Raum- und Zeitgestalt (1959). In this last work, he maintained the irreducibility of the living form to inert matter, a stance which put him in direct opposition to the Russian biologist Alexander Oparin who was conducting experiments aimed at demonstrating the possibility of giving rise to elementary forms of life by reproducing the original, terrestrial, atmospheric conditions.