Everything about Richard Willst Tter totally explained
Richard Martin Willstätter (
August 13,
1872 –
August 3,
1942) was a
Jewish-
German organic chemist whose study of the structure of plant pigments,
chlorophyll included, won him the 1915
Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Willstätter invented
paper chromatography independently of
Mikhail Tsvet.
Willstätter was born in
Karlsruhe in
Baden. He went to school there and, when his family moved, he attended the Technical School in
Nuremberg. At age 18 he entered the
University of Munich to study science and stayed for the next fifteen years. He was in the Department of Chemistry, first as a student of
Adolf von Baeyer -- he received his doctorate in 1894 - then as a faculty member. His doctoral thesis was on the structure of
cocaine. Willstätter continued his research into other
alkaloids and synthesized several of them. In 1896 he was named
Lecturer and in 1902
Professor extraordinarius (professor without a chair).
In 1905 he left Munich to become professor at the
ETH Zürich and there he worked on the plant pigment
chlorophyll. He determined its structure.
In 1912 he became professor of chemistry at the
University of Berlin and director of the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, studying the structure of pigments of flowers and fruits.
In 1916 he returned to Munich as the successor to his mentor Baeyer. During the 1920s Willstätter investigated the mechanisms of enzyme reactions and did much to establish that enzymes are chemical substances, not biological organisms.
In 1924 Willstätter's career came to "a tragic end when, as a gesture against increasing antisemitism, he announced his retirement." According to his Nobel biography
(External Link
): "Expressions of confidence by the Faculty, by his students and by the Minister failed to shake the fifty-three year old scientist in his decision to resign. He lived on in retirement in Munich....Dazzling offers both at home and abroad were alike rejected by him."
In 1938 Willstätter fled the
Gestapo and escaped to
Switzerland. He spent the last three years of his life there in
Muralto near
Locarno writing his autobiography. He died of a heart attack in 1942.
Willstätter's autobiography,
Aus meinem Leben, wasn't published in German until 1949. It was translated into English as
From My Life in 1965.
Anecdote
In 1911 the fledgling American chemist
Michael Heidelberger went to work for a year with Willstätter in
Zurich. Willstätter helped his somewhat impecunious American student by sharing the cost of laboratory supplies with him, arranging that when expensive materials, such as
silver nitrate, were to be bought, it was his turn to pay, while Heidelberger took turns buying cheaper materials like
sulfuric acid. "Better training than that you couldn't have," Heidelberger summed up his experience with Willstätter. They remained friends for life.
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