Nobel Prize

Contents: Based on materials from the 1999 Nobel Poster for Chemistry.

Retrosynthetic analysis can be compared to the climbing of a tree. You are at the root of the tree (the target molecule) and want to climb to the top branches (the starting materials). The tree branches off many times. You have to choose your way! Which way is the fastest, the easiest and the most…

more

more

I was born the eldest of three sons of Ryokichi Fukui, a foreign trade merchant and factory manager, and Chie Fukui, in Nara, Japan, on October 4, 1918. In my high school years, chemistry was not my favourite subject, but the most decisive occurrence in my educational career came when my father asked the advice…

Hermann Emil Fischer was born on October 9, 1852, at Euskirchen, in the Cologne district. His father was a successful business man. After three years with a private tutor, Emil went to the local school and then spent two years at school at Wetzlar, and two more at Bonn where he passed his final examination…

Irène Curie, born in Paris, September 12, 1897, was the daughter of , and since 1926 the wife of Frédéric Joliot. After having started her studies at the Faculty of Science in Paris, she served as a nurse radiographer during the First World War. She became Doctor of Science in 1925, having prepared a thesis…

Max Ferdinand Perutz was born in Vienna on May 19th, 1914. Both his parents, Hugo Perutz and Dely Goldschmidt, came from families of textile manufacturers who had made their fortune in the 19th century by the introduction of mechanical spinning and weaving into the Austrian monarchy. He was sent to school at the Theresianum, a…

Stanford Moore was born in 1913 in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, where his father was a member of the faculty of the School of Law of Vanderbilt University. His developmental years were in a home environment which made the pursuit of knowledge an eagerly adopted undertaking. He had the opportunity to…

more