Helmut Werner (chemist)

Helmut Werner (born April 19, 1934 in Mühlhausen / Thuringia ) is a German chemist.

biography

Werner studied chemistry from 1952 at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena with a diploma in 1958 under Franz Hein . Werner also wanted to do a doctorate with Hein, which he was denied because of non-socialist behavior . He went to the West in 1958, which is why he was banned from entering the GDR for a long time and was only invited to give lectures again in 1969. He received his doctorate in inorganic chemistry from the Technical University of Munich in 1961 under the later Nobel Prize winner Ernst Otto Fischer ( on the reactivity of carbonyl compounds of nickel and palladium towards cyclic diolefins ) and was a post-doctoral student at Caltech in the USA in 1962/63 . In 1966 he completed his habilitation at the Technical University of Munich (habilitation thesis: Kinetic and Mechanistic Investigations on Substitution Reactions in Neutral Complexes ) and was then a private lecturer. In 1968 he became assistant professor and from the 1970 summer semester full professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Zurich (where he was also a member of the Senate and doctoral supervisor of Wolfgang Kläui ). In 1969, he turned down an offer as director of the Eberhard Zintl Institute at the TH Darmstadt as the successor to Hans Wolfgang Kohlschütter . Since October 1, 1975, he has succeeded Hubert Schmidbaur as professor and co-director of the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg . In 2002 he retired.

He was visiting professor at the University of Cambridge (1983), the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (1984), the University of Zaragoza and at the CNRS Research Institute in Toulouse (1989).

After the reunification and peaceful revolution in the GDR , he took over the evaluation of chemistry at the University of Jena.

plant

Werner deals with organometallic chemistry and complex chemistry, especially complexes with the electron-rich transition metals ruthenium , osmium , rhodium , iridium . He also deals with the role of metals in the fixation of unstable compounds and the activation of hydrocarbons with electron-rich metals and their use in organic synthesis. From 1990 to 2001 he was the spokesman for the Collaborative Research Center 347 Selective Reactions of Metal-Activated Molecules . In collaboration with industry, he developed new catalysts, e.g. B. for olefin metathesis . He also deals with the history of chemistry and has published a book on the history of inorganic chemistry in Germany.

He synthesized the first borazole transition metal complex and the first example of a triple-decker sandwich complex, the first metal-basic half-sandwich compounds and homologous series of square-planar metal cumulenes. He also discovered a new class of phosphane, arsane, and stibane complexes of the form , where E stands for phosphorus, arsenic or antimony and R for alkyl or aryl radicals. ${\displaystyle ER_{3}}$

Memberships and honors

In 1972 he was a Fellow of the British Council and in 1987 he was a Pacific Westcoast Inorganic Lecturer. In 1988 he received the Alfred Stock Memorial Prize , in 1994 the Centenary Medal and Lectureship of the Royal Society of Chemistry , in 1994 the Max Planck Research Prize and in 1995 the Spanish JC Mutis Prize. In 1995 he was Paolo Chini Lecturer at the Italian Chemical Society and in 2004 Gordon Stone Lecturer. In 1992 he was a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and in 1987 a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. On his 65th birthday in 1999, the Society of German Chemists organized a celebratory colloquium in Würzburg. He has multiple honorary doctorates (Jena, Zaragoza). He is a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina . and an elected member of the New York Academy of Sciences .

Albrecht Salzer was one of his doctoral students . Other students are Wolfgang Kläui (who completed his habilitation), Mario Scotti (Catholic University of Santiago de Chile), Marcel Schlaf (University of Guelph), Thomas Braun (Humboldt University Berlin). His postdoctoral qualifications also include Jörg Sundermeyer (University of Marburg), Lutz Gade (University of Heidelberg), Martin Bröring (TU Braunschweig).

Fonts

• Landmarks in Organo-Transition Metal Chemistry: a personal view, Springer 2009
• Editor with Axel Griesbeck: Selective reactions of metal-activated molecules: proceedings of the symposium held in Würzburg, September 18-20, 1991, Vieweg 1992
• Editor with Jörg Sundermeyer: Stereoselective reactions of metal activated molecules: proceedings of the second symposium held in Würzburg, September 21-23, 1994, Vieweg 1995
• Editor: Selective reactions of metal-activated molecules: proceedings of the third symposium held in Würzburg, September 17 - 19, 1997, Vieweg 1998
• Editor with Gerhard Erker: Organometallics in organic synthesis 2: aspects of a modern interdisciplinary field, Springer 1989 (Symposium Würzburg 1988)
• with Ernst Otto Fischer : Metal-π-complexes with di- and oligoolefinic ligands, Verlag Chemie 1963 (also translated into English (Metal [pi] -complexes, Elsevier 1966) and Russian with extensions)
• History of Inorganic Chemistry. The development of a science in Germany from Döbereiner to today, Wiley-VCH 2017 (on p. 500 also on Werner himself)

literature

• Klaus Koschel: The development and differentiation of chemistry at the University of Würzburg. In: Peter Baumgart (Ed.): Four hundred years of the University of Würzburg. A commemorative publication. Degener & Co. (Gerhard Gessner), Neustadt an der Aisch 1982 (= sources and contributions to the history of the University of Würzburg. Volume 6), ISBN 3-7686-9062-8 , pp. 703–749; here: p. 745 f.

Web links

• Homepage in Würzburg
• University minutes for the 65th birthday
• CV, Leopoldina, pdf

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Werner himself in his book on the history of inorganic chemistry, Wiley-VCH 2016, p. 500
2. ↑ Member entry by Prof. Dr. Helmut Werner (with picture and CV) at the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina , accessed on July 20, 2016.