Richard Willstatter

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Prof Richard Martin Willstätter FRS (Fort) HFRSE (13 August 1872 – 3 August 1942) was a German organic chemist whose study of plant pigments, chlorophyll included, received the 1915 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Willstätter, a Mikhail Tsvet biologist, invented paper chromatography.

Life

Willstätter was born in Karlsruhe, Germany, into a Jewish family. He was the son of Maxwell (Max) Willstätter, a textile retailer, and his partner, Sophie Ulmann.

He attended the Karlsruhe Gymnasium and, when his family moved to Nuremberg, he attended the Technical School there. He went to the University of Munich to study science at the age of 18, and stayed for the next 15 years. He first joined the Department of Chemistry as a student of Alfred Einhorn; later as a faculty member. His doctoral thesis was on cocaine's chemistry. Willstätter continued his experiments into other alkaloids and synthesized several of them. He was named Lecturer in 1896 and Professor Exceptional in 1902 (professor without a chair).

He left Munich to become a professor at ETH Zürich in 1905, and there he worked on the plant pigment chlorophyll. He introduced the unit's empirical formula.

He became a professor of chemistry at the University of Berlin and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in 1912, investigating the chemistry of flower and fruit pigments. Willstätter explained that chlorophyll was a blend of two substances, chlorophyll a and chlorophyll b. He lived in the Dahlem neighborhood with other scientists.

Fritz Haber, a 1915 friend of Fritz Haber, begged him to participate in the synthesis of poison gases. Willstätter would not work on poisons but did decide to work on safety. He and his coworkers developed a three-layer filter that absorbed all of the enemy's gases. By 1917, thirty million were produced, and Willstätter was named in the Iron Cross Second Class.

He returned to Munich in 1916 as the successor to his mentor Baeyer. Willstätter analyzed enzyme reactions during the 1920s and discovered that enzyme reactions were chemical reactions rather than biological organisms. However, he refused to accept that enzymes were proteins at the end of his life.

Willstätter's life came to "a tragic end" in 1924, when he announced his resignation as a sign against rising antisemitism. "Expressions of confidence by the Faculty, his students, and the Minister managed to sway the fifty-three-year scientist's decision to resign," according to his Nobel biography. He lived in Munich and was in retirement. "The dredging offers both at home and abroad were almost universally rejected by him." His only study was done with assistants who phoned their findings. Despite pleas for him to migrate to Jerusalem or Switzerland earlier in the 1930s, Willstätter did not migrate from Germany until 1939.

Willstätter emigrated to Switzerland in 1939. He spent the last three years of his life in Muralto, near Locarno, writing his autobiography. In 1942, he died as a result of a heart attack.

Aus meinem Leben, Willstätter's autobiography, was not released in German until 1949. In 1965, it was converted into English as From My Life.

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