Richard Willstätter - German organic chemist

Richard Martin Willstätter was a German organic chemist whose study of the structure of plant pigments won him the 1915 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. He invented paper chromatography independently of Mikhail Tsvett.

Richard Martin Willstätter was born in Karlsruhe in Baden on August 13, 1872, was the son of Maxwell (Max) Willstätter, a textile merchant, and his wife, Sophie Ulmann. He went to school in Nuremberg and studied chemistry at the University of Munich. Willstätter obtained his doctorate from the University of Munich in 1894 for work on the structure of cocaine.

While serving as an assistant to Adolf von Baeyer at Munich, he continued research into the structure of alkaloids and synthesized several. Willstätter stayed there for the following fifteen years, first as a student, from 1896 as a lecturer – pursuing his scientific work independently – until in early 1902 he became J. Thiele’s successor as Extraordinary Professor.

He was professor of chemistry at the University of Berlin and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute at Berlin (1912–16), where his investigations revealed the structure of many of the pigments of flowers and fruits.

In 1915 he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his studies on pigments in the plant kingdom, especially chlorophyll.

During the 1920s, he investigated the mechanisms of enzyme reactions and did much to establish that enzymes are chemical substances and not biological organisms. His view of enzymes as nonprotein in nature was widely held until disproved in 1930.

In 1924 Willstätter resigned and became a freelancer in the chemical industry. In 1938 he fled from the Gestapo with the help of his pupil A. Stoll and managed to emigrate to Switzerland, losing all but a meagre part of his belongings.

Willstätter was married to Sophie Leser, the daughter of a Heidelberg University professor. They had one son, Ludwig, and one daughter, Ida Margarete. He died of a heart attack in Muralto (Ticino) on 3 August 1942
Richard Willstätter - German organic chemist

Wallace Hume Carothers (1896-1937)

Born on April 27, 1896, in Burlington, Iowa, Wallace Carothers was an American chemist and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont and is credited with the invention of nylon.

He entered Capital City Commercial College in Des Moines in 1914 and graduated a year later in accountancy and secretarial administration.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in 1921 from the University of Illinois, Carothers went to the University of South Dakota, where he began his independent research at the same time he was a chemistry instructor.

After teaching for a year, Carothers returned to the University of Illinois in 1922 to work under Roger Adams. He earned a PhD from the University of Illinois in 1924 with specialty in organic chemistry. He was acclaimed as ‘one of the most brilliant students who had ever been awarded the doctor’s degree at Illinois’.

Carothers was then recruited by Harvard but after three semesters there DuPont offered him the task of organizing the company’s research in organic chemistry and especially polymerization.

Soon he had assembled the team of talented research scientists who would play a major part in the development of nylon. His first paper on polymerization appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 1929.

In 1936 Carothers was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the first industrial organic chemist to receive this honor.
Wallace Hume Carothers (1896-1937)