The Austrian physiologist and medical chemist Fritz Pregl (1869-1930) developed the methods of quantitative organic microanalysis.

Fritz Pregl was born on Sept. 3, 1869, in Laibach, now Ljubljana in Yugoslavia, but then a provincial capital in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the death of his father, a bank official, he moved in 1887 with his mother to Graz, the seat of a university. There he studied medicine and obtained his medical degree in 1894.

As a student, Pregl had been interested in physiology and upon graduation became a teaching assistant in the Physiological Institute of the university. He remained in this field as he rose on the academic ladder to attain the rank of associate professor in 1904. However, he had meanwhile also been attracted to, and become quite adept in, organic chemical laboratory research, and indeed his publications from that period reveal a strong predilection for the chemical aspects of physiology as well...