Conrad Hans Eugster

Conrad Hans Eugster (born July 17, 1921 in Landquart GR ; † August 21, 2012 in Uster ) was a Swiss chemist and professor at the University of Zurich ( organic chemistry , natural product chemistry ).

biography

Eugster was the son of an electrical engineer and, after graduating from Chur in 1941, studied chemistry at the University of Zurich , where he received his doctorate in 1953 with Paul Karrer ( total synthesis of carotenoid dye genes ). In 1955 he completed his habilitation in Zurich ( about the fly agaric poison muscarin ), where he became an associate professor in 1963 and a full professor of organic chemistry in 1969 . From 1978 to 1980 he was dean of the chemistry faculty. In 1988 he retired.

He dealt with natural product chemistry, especially secondary substances from flowering plants and mushrooms with striking properties such as carotenoids, terpenes, rose pigments, alkaloids and vitamins. He wrote around 330 scientific articles. The subject of his dissertation was the first total synthesis of a carotene ( carotene). Much of the work concerned the muscarinic series (the alkaloid of the toadstool ) and palustrin , the main alkaloid of marsh horsetail , which is poisonous for livestock , and which he dealt with as a student at Karrer. ${\displaystyle \beta }$

In 1954 he received the Max Hartmann Prize from the Swiss Chemical Society . In 1989 he became a member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences.

With Emile Cherbuliez , he edited supplementary volumes on Walter Karrer , Constitution and Occurrence of Organic Plant Substances , from 1976 onwards .

His brother Hans P. Eugster was a mineralogist, petrologist and geochemist.

literature

• Peter Rüedi : Obituary. In Chimia , Volume 67, 2013, p. 88.

Web links

• Peter Rüedi: Eugster, Conrad Hans. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ biographical data, publications and Academic pedigree of Conrad Eugster at academictree.org, accessed on 4 February 2018th