Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (Austrian German: [ˈkɔnraːd tsaxaˈriːas ˈloːrɛnts] ; 7 November 1903 – 27 February 1989) was an Austrian zoologist, ethologist, and ornithologist. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. He is often regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, the study of animal behavior. He developed an approach that began with an earlier generation, including his teacher Oskar Heinroth.
Lorenz studied instinctive behavior in animals, especially in greylag geese and jackdaws. Working with geese, he investigated the principle of imprinting, the process by which some nidifugous birds (i.e. birds that leave their nest early) bond instinctively with the first moving object that they see within the first hours of hatching. Although Lorenz did not discover the topic, he became widely known for his descriptions of imprinting as an instinctive bond. In 1936, he met Tinbergen, and the two collaborated in developing ethology as a separate sub-discipline of biology. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Lorenz the 65th most cited scholar of the 20th century in the technical psychology journals, introductory psychology textbooks, and survey responses.
Lorenz's work was interrupted by the onset of World War II, and in 1941 he was recruited into the German Army as a medic. In 1944, he was sent to the Eastern Front, where he was captured by the Soviet Red Army and spent four years as a German prisoner of war in Soviet Armenia. After the war, he regretted his membership in the Nazi Party.
Lorenz wrote numerous books, some of which, such as King Solomon's Ring, On Aggression, and Man Meets Dog, became popular reading. His last work Here I Am – Where Are You? is a summary of his life's work and focuses on his famous studies of greylag geese.
Lorenz was the son of Adolf Lorenz, a wealthy and distinguished surgeon, and his wife Emma (née Lecher), a physician who had been her husband's assistant. The family lived on a large estate at Altenberg and had a city apartment in Vienna. He was educated at the Public Schottengymnasium of the Benedictine monks in Vienna.
In his autobiographical essay, published in 1973 in Les Prix Nobel (winners of the prizes are requested to provide such essays), Lorenz credits his career to his parents, who "were supremely tolerant of my inordinate love for animals", and to his childhood encounter with Selma Lagerlöf's The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, which filled him with a great enthusiasm about wild geese.
At the request of his father, he began a premedical curriculum in 1922 at Columbia University, but returned to Vienna in 1923 to continue his studies at the University of Vienna. He graduated as Doctor of Medicine (MD) in 1928 and became an assistant professor at the Institute of Anatomy until 1935. He finished his zoological studies in 1933 and received his second doctorate (PhD).
While still a student, Lorenz began developing what would become a large menagerie, ranging from domestic to exotic animals. In his popular book King Solomon's Ring, Lorenz recounts that while studying at the University of Vienna, he kept a variety of animals at his parents' apartment, ranging from fish to a capuchin monkey named Gloria.
In 1936, at an international scientific symposium on instinct, Lorenz met his great friend and colleague Nikolaas Tinbergen. Together they studied geese – wild, domestic, and hybrid. One result of these studies was that Lorenz "realized that an overpowering increase in the drives of feeding as well as of copulation and a waning of more differentiated social instincts is characteristic of very many domestic animals". Lorenz began to suspect and fear "that analogous processes of deterioration may be at work with civilized humanity". This observation of bird hybrids caused Lorenz to believe that domestication resulting from urbanisation in humans might also cause dysgenic effects, and to argue in two papers that the Nazi eugenics policies against this were therefore scientifically justified.
In 1940 he became a professor of psychology at the University of Königsberg. He was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1941. He sought to be a motorcycle mechanic, but instead he was assigned as a military psychologist, conducting racial studies on humans in occupied Poznań under Rudolf Hippius. The objective was to study the biological characteristics of "German–Polish half-breeds" to determine whether they "benefited" from the same work ethics as "pure" Germans. The degree to which Lorenz participated in the project is unknown, but the project director Hippius referred a couple of times to Lorenz as an "examining psychologist".
Lorenz later described that he once saw transports of concentration camp inmates at Fort VII near Poznań, which made him "fully realize the complete inhumanity of the Nazis".
He was sent to the Russian front in 1944, where he quickly became a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union from 1944 to 1948. In captivity in Soviet Armenia, he continued to work as a medic and "became tolerably fluent in Russian and got quite friendly with some Russians, mostly doctors". When he was repatriated, he was allowed to keep the manuscript of a book he had been writing and his pet starling. He arrived back in Altenberg (his family home, near Vienna) both "with manuscript and bird intact". The manuscript became his 1973 book Behind the Mirror.
The Max Planck Society established the Lorenz Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Buldern, Germany, in 1950. In his memoirs, Lorenz described the chronology of his war years differently from what historians have been able to document after his death. He himself claimed that he was captured in 1942, where in reality he was only sent to the front and captured in 1944, leaving out entirely his involvement with the Poznań project.
In 1958, Lorenz transferred to the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Seewiesen. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for discoveries in individual and social behavior patterns" with two other important early ethologists – Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. In 1969, he became the first recipient of the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca.
He was a friend and student of renowned biologist Sir Julian Huxley (grandson of "Darwin's bulldog", Thomas Henry Huxley). Famed psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson and Sir Peter Scott were good friends. Lorenz and Karl Popper were childhood friends; many years after they met, during the celebration of Popper's 80 years, they wrote together a book entitled Die Zukunft ist offen.
He retired from the Max Planck Institute in 1973 but continued to research and publish from Altenberg and Grünau im Almtal in Austria. He died on 27 February 1989 in Altenberg.
Lorenz wed his childhood companion Margarethe Gebhardt, a gynaecologist and the daughter of a local market gardener. The couple had three children – one son and two daughters. He resided on the Lorenz family estate, notable for its "fantastical neo-baroque mansion", formally belonging to his father.
Lorenz is recognized as one of the founding fathers of the field of ethology, the study of animal behavior. He is best known for his research of the principle of attachment, or imprinting, through which in some species a bond is formed between a newborn animal and its caregiver. This principle had been discovered by Douglas Spalding in the 19th century, and Lorenz's mentor Oskar Heinroth had also worked on the topic, but Lorenz's description of Prägung, imprinting, in nidifugous birds such as greylag geese in his 1935 book Der Kumpan in der Umwelt des Vogels ("The Companion in the Environment of Birds") became the foundational description of the phenomenon.