Anselme Payen

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Anselme Payen

Anselme Payen (born January 17, 1795 in Paris ; † May 13, 1871 there ) was a French chemist . He synthesized borax , isolated the first enzyme, and discovered and analyzed cellulose .

Payen's father, Jean Baptiste Payen, founded a chemical factory in Paris in 1792 (e.g. for sulfuric acid, ammonium chloride, hydrochloric acid, borax , gelatine) and later a beet sugar factory in Vaugirard near Paris, when France was cut off from sugar imports under Napoleon. Payen studied physics , chemistry and mathematics at the École polytechnique . In 1815 he joined his father's factory and took over both plants (the chemical factory and the beet sugar factory) after his father's death in 1820. In 1829 he became professor of industrial and agricultural chemistry at the École Centrale des Arts et des Manufactures and, in 1839, an additional professor at Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris, also for applied chemistry. He held both professorships until his death. On January 10, 1842, he became a member of the Académie des Sciences .

While the borax in his factory was previously imported from the Orient as a natural mineral and was only cleaned, he invented a synthesis route for borax from caustic soda and Tuscan boric acid . Since people were not used to pure chemicals at the time, he had to re-dye the product. He was able to offer the artificial product much cheaper than imports, thereby breaking a monopoly of the Netherlands.

He also discovered a new method of purifying sugar (decolorizing with animal charcoal , which he introduced to the sugar industry), invented a decolorimeter (to measure the decolorization of sugar solutions), and purifying starch and ethanol from potatoes (described in a book in 1826 for which he received the gold medal of the French Agricultural Society) as well as a method for detecting nitrogen .

Payens was best known for the discovery of the first enzyme , diastase (alpha-amylase to break down starch in glucose), which he described in 1833 with the chemist and pharmacist Jean-Francois Persoz (1805–1868).

He studied the composition of wood and used nitric acid and caustic soda to extract a substance that he called cellulose ( les cellules ). He also identified it in cotton and broken it down into sugar ( glucose ) using sulfuric acid . He found that cellulose had the same percentage of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen as starch. He also found other components of the wood such as lignin , which he still viewed as a mixture and called stored substance. A dispute arose with Edmond Frémy and Otto Linné Erdmann about the composition of the wood .

He married in 1821. Only one of his children reached adulthood. He was an officer and later commander of the Legion of Honor .

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Individual evidence

  1. List of members since 1666: Letter P. Académie des sciences, accessed on February 1, 2020 (French).