Adolf Frederick Johann Butenandt was born on March 24, 1903 at Bremerhaven-Wesermünde. The son of a business man Otto Butenandt of Hamburg, he went to school at Bremerhaven and studied chemistry at the Universities of Marburg and Göttingen. In 1927 he graduated at the University of Göttingen, where he had studied under From 1927 until…

Robert Burns Woodward was born in Boston on April 10th, 1917, the only child of Margaret Burns, a native of Glasgow, and Arthur Woodward, of English antecedents, who died in October, 1918, at the age of thirty-three. Woodward was attracted to chemistry at a very early age, and indulged his taste for the science in…

Presentation Speech by Professor P. Klason, President of , on December 10, 1906 Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. The Academy of Sciences has this year awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry to Professor Henri Moissan of the University of Paris for isolating and investigating the chemical element fluorine and for introducing the…

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  In photosynthesis plants use light to form energy-rich compounds from water and carbon dioxide from the air. The decisive reactions occur in a reaction centre in the cell. The incoming light is caught in an antenna system and finds its way to a pair of chlorophyll molecules (see picture). Within these molecules an electron…

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        Editors: Solgerd Björn-Rasmussen and Margareta Wiberg Roland, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Authors: Prof. Anders Liljas, Lund University, Member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry and Dr. Lars Hederstedt and Dr. Salam Al-Karadaghi, Lund University. Layout and illustrations: Kjell Lundin, Explicare AB. Printed by: Tryckindustri 1997. Photos: Jilly Wendell and…

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Heinrich Otto Wieland was born as the son of Württemberger parents, Dr. Theodor Wieland and Elise Blum, on June 4, 1877, in Pforzheim where his father was a pharmaceutical chemist. He studied at the Universities of Munich, Berlin and Stuttgart, and then returned to the Baeyer Laboratory in Munich where, in 1901, he received his…