Christoph Grundmann

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Christoph Grundmann (born December 29, 1908 in Berlin , † December 15, 2003 in Churchill (Pennsylvania) ) was a German chemist.

life and work

Grundmann studied chemistry in Berlin and Heidelberg and received his doctorate from 1931 to 1934 in Richard Kuhn's group at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg on the subject of the constitution of lycopene .

During his doctorate he became a member of the SA in 1933 , from which he resigned in 1935 due to a lack of service. After receiving his doctorate, he was employed at the University of Heidelberg in 1937 , where he researched the synthesis of polyene-dicarboxylic acids. In 1938 he received an order from IG Farben to produce explosives that were classified as relevant to the war.

Grundmann then returned to Kuhn, who founded a working group for vitamin research in 1940. Based on Kuhn's work on vitamin B6 , Grundmann developed a partial synthesis of the vitamin that he offered Hoffmann-La Roche . In March 1939 the Gestapo arrested Grundmann on his return from Switzerland for treason. However, the charges were dropped shortly thereafter.

Grundmann worked from 1939 until the end of the war at Deutsche Hydrierwerke Rodleben on sulfonamides . From 1945 to 1950 he taught at the University of Halle and from 1950 to 1951 he held a professorship at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

As part of Operation Overcast , he was moved to the United States , where he initially worked for Mathieson Chemical Corp. worked on the atomic bomb program. He taught at Ohio State University until 1961, after which he became a full professor of organic chemistry at Carnegie-Mellon University . Among other things, Grundmann developed the Grundmann aldehyde synthesis named after him .

literature

  • Florian Schmaltz: The treason affair Grundmann . In: Warfare agent research in National Socialism. On the cooperation between Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, the military and industry , Wallstein Verlag, 2005, ISBN 978-3892448808 , pp. 387-412.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary Christoph Grundmann
  2. ↑ Ch. Grundmann: A new process for converting carboxylic acids into aldehydes . In: Justus Liebig's Annals of Chemistry . tape 524 , 1936, pp. 31-48 , doi : 10.1002 / jlac.19365240105 .
personal data
SURNAME Grundmann, Christoph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German chemist
DATE OF BIRTH December 29, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH December 15, 2003
Place of death Churchill, Pennsylvania