Friedrich Asinger

Friedrich Asinger

Friedrich Asinger (born June 26, 1907 in Freiland / Lower Austria , Austria ; † March 7, 1999 in Aachen ) was an Austrian chemist and professor of technical chemistry . He became known thanks to his work in the fields of petrochemistry, substitution reactions on alkanes and olefins. The widely used internship book Organikum was developed and published on the basis of his suggestions and support . He is the namesake of the Asinger reaction , a multi-component reaction that produces 3- thiazolines . Numerous industrial chemists and later professors emerged from his scientific school.

Live and act

Youth and Studies

Asinger grew up with an older brother and two sisters in Lower Austria as the son of the manager of a paper and cardboard factory. His mother came from a respected family of innkeepers. Asinger obtained his Abitur in 1924 at the secondary school in Krems / Donau at the age of 17. He studied on chemistry at the TH Vienna , where he in 1932 as an academic student of Friedrich Boeck (1876-1958) with a thesis "On the influence of substituents on the saponification of benzal" doctorate was. He passed all of the above exams with distinction.

First experience in industry and university

He gained professional experience as a department head in the factory for chemically prepared papers "Koreska", as a chemist at the Viennese "Vacuum Oil" and as a research chemist in the "Central Test Laboratory of Ammoniakwerke GmbH", Merseburg / Leuna.

Asinger received his habilitation in 1943 at the University of Graz , whereupon he started his scientific research. The first milestones are the teaching rehearsal (December 7, 1943) and the lectureship (February 23, 1944) at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg , which is followed by a number of positions in industrial and university research, such as a position as an honorary lecturer of the University of Halle with Karl Ziegler .

At the end of the war, Friedrich Asinger suffered a serious setback in his career. Because of his membership in the NSDAP in Austria since 1933, he lost his post as honorary lecturer at the Martin Luther University at the end of 1945. Despite written support from the Leuna-Werke - also with reference to the goodwill of his Russian superiors - and letters of support from various social organizations, his efforts to reverse this dismissal were ultimately unsuccessful.

Years in the Soviet Union

In October 1946, Asinger was deported to the Soviet Union together with other engineers, chemists and physicists from the Leuna-Werke during the Ossawakim operation and subsequently housed in Dzerzhinsk , near Gorky , where he worked as a working group leader on the development of rocket fuels.

From 1951 he worked in Rubeschnoye in the Donbass . During his eight-year stay, he observed that the reaction of ketones or aldehydes , sulfur or hydrogen sulfide, and ammonia or amines produced various nitrogen- and sulfur-containing heterocycles. His monographs "Chemistry and Technology of Paraffins" and "Chemistry and Technology of Monoolefins", which the Akademie-Verlag Berlin published in 1956 and 1957, date from this period .

Years in the GDR

In 1954 he returned to Germany, three years later than most of the other scientists at the Leuna works . He worked in Leuna and was also an honorary professor in Halle-Wittenberg. In 1957 he followed a call to a chair for organic chemistry at the Martin Luther University in Halle (Saale) and later at the Technical University of Dresden . Asinger encouraged HGO Becker and other senior assistants to write the “ Organikum ”, which is still popular today , a workbook for the organic-chemical basic internship in chemistry, with a total circulation of almost 400,000. The book was launched by Asinger as an institute obligation on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the founding of the GDR .

Professor at the RWTH

In 1959 he left the GDR as a citizen of the Republic of Austria and accepted a position at RWTH Aachen University , where he took over the management of the Institute for Technical Chemistry and Petrochemistry.

Structure of the drug D-penicillamine

During his years as a professor at various universities, he further developed the chemistry of nitrogen-sulfur heterocycles, so that it is now known as Asinger chemistry . A milestone in this chemistry is the total synthesis of the drug D- penicillamine in a thirteen- step synthesis, starting from isobutyraldehyde , ammonia and sulfur. He published a total of 118 papers on this topic. In 1968 Asinger was one of the signatories of the “ Marburg Manifesto ”, along with many other professors from RWTH Aachen University , which formed an academic front against the emerging co-determination at universities. In 1972 he retired in Aachen.

In 1986 he showed methanol in his book . Chemical and energy raw materials on ways to the methanol economy , which later other authors like George A. Olah took up again.

From the scientific school of Friedrich Asinger - in addition to many industrial chemists - a total of 26 later professors emerged, 10 of them from the Leuna and Dresden time. Well-known students of Asinger are Heribert Offermanns , a long-time board member of Degussa AG , Egon Fanghänel , professor of organic chemistry at the Technical University of Merseburg and then at the University of Halle-Wittenberg as well as Karl Gewald , who through the Gewald reaction and his work on the The area of thiophene and heterocyclic chemistry .

Honors

The natural science faculty of the TH “Carl Schorlemmer” Leuna-Merseburg and the Johannes Kepler University ( Linz ) awarded him an honorary doctorate . He was the recipient of the " Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class", the "Carl Engler Medal" of the DGMK , the Hans Höfer Medal of the " Austrian Society for Petroleum Sciences ", the "Freiherr Auer von Welsbach Medal" of the "Austrian Chemical Society" and member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences .

Works (selection)

• Methanol, chemical and energy raw material . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 1987, ISBN 3-05-500341-1 .
• Chemistry and Technology of Monoolefins . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1957.
• Chemistry and technology of paraffinic hydrocarbons . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1959.
• Introduction to Petrochemistry . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1959.

literature

• Friedrich Asinger (1907-1999): A Mediator between basic and applied research of W. Keim and H. Offermanns, Angewandte Chemie 119 , 6116-6120 ( 2007 ); doi: 10.1002 / anie.200700904 .
• Winfried R. Pötsch, Annelore Fischer and Wolfgang Müller with the collaboration of Heinz Cassebaum : Lexicon of important chemists . Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1988, pp. 18-19, ISBN 3-323-00185-0 .
• Henrik Eberle : The Martin Luther University in the time of National Socialism. Mdv, Halle 2002, ISBN 3-89812-150-X , p. 402f
• Martin Bertau, Heribert Offermanns , Ludolf Plass, Friedrich Schmidt, Hans-Jürgen Wernicke: Methanol: The Basic Chemical and Energy Feedstock of the Future: Asinger's Vision Today , 750 pages, Verlag Springer; 2014, ISBN 978-3-642-39708-0

Web links

• Entry on Friedrich Asinger in the Catalogus Professorum Halensis

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Egon Fanghänel 50 years "Organikum" Nachrichten aus der Chemie no. 60, November 2012, pp 1090 to 1091
2. ↑ Dietrich von Engelhardt: Biographical Encyclopedia of German-Speaking Natural Scientists , Volume 1. Saur, Munich 2003, p. 25.
3. ↑ Roland Mayo: Schwefel-Mayer and the principle of the optimum and pessimum . BoD GmbH, 2004, ISBN 3-8334-1068-X ( limited preview in the Google book search).
4. ↑ Wolfgang M. Weigert, Heribert Offermanns and Paul Scherberich: D-Penicillamin - Production and Properties , Angewandte Chemie International Edition 14, 330–336 (1975).
5. ↑ Wording and list of signatures of the manifesto against the politicization of universities ( memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , in: Blätter für German and international politics , born in 1968; Issue 8. 
6. ^ Marburg Manifesto , in: Der Spiegel of July 22, 1968.
7. ↑ Gewald reaction .
8. ↑ Hans Höfer Medal . wko.at. Retrieved February 15, 2016.
9. ↑ Presentation of the Carl Engler Medal in 1972 to Prof. Dr. techn. Dr. phil. habil. Dipl.-Ing. Friedrich Asinger (PDF; 102 kB) www.dgmk.de. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved June 5, 2009.