Hellmut Bredereck

Hellmut Bredereck, November 1979

Hellmut Johann Friedrich Bredereck (born May 29, 1904 in Frankfurt am Main , † May 2, 1981 in Stuttgart ) was a German chemist and benefactor .

Life

Hellmut Bredereck attended the humanistic Goethe-Gymnasium Frankfurt am Main and studied chemistry from 1922 to 1927 at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main and at the University of Greifswald .

In 1927 he was awarded a doctorate by Burckhardt Helferich with a thesis on "halohydrins of glucose" at the University of Greifswald. phil. PhD in chemistry. From 1927 to 1933 he was Burckhardt Helferich's private assistant in Greifswald. In 1933 he completed his habilitation in chemistry at the University of Leipzig with the thesis "On the constitution of yeast nucleic acid". From 1933 to 1939 he was a private lecturer , from 1933 to 1941 Professor of Chemistry at the Mathematics and Natural Sciences Department of the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Leipzig; In addition to carbohydrate chemistry, with which he continued to work, Hellmut Bredereck opened up a completely new field of work in Leipzig with studies of high-molecular nucleic acids , about whose structure and biological significance hardly anything was known at the time. Through chemical and biological degradation reactions, important building blocks of the nucleic acids were elucidated in their chemical structure and proved by subsequent chemical syntheses. A large number of publications and monographs on this topic made Hellmut Bredereck known nationally and internationally within a short period of time. Building on the fundamental and groundbreaking studies on the constitution of nucleic acids, English and American working groups in particular succeeded in clearing up the genetic code , ie the basis of inheritance.

In 1941 he was appointed director of the Institute for Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Jena. Syntheses of pharmacologically important compounds from the pyrimidine and purine series were the focus of research during these war years. He achieved success with a simple synthesis of caffeine , the active ingredient of the coffee bean, which was of great importance at the time because of the war-related shortage of coffee. In June 1945, Hellmut Bredereck and his family, together with other scientists, were forcibly relocated to Heidenheim / Brenz in Württemberg by the US Army a few days before Saxony and Thuringia were handed over to the Russian occupation forces. There he soon started again with chemical work. A chemical company was set up which Hellmut Bredereck managed until 1949 and which at that time employed 180 people. Every month, 12 tons of the sweetener saccharin, which was very popular before the currency reform, were produced.

In 1947 he had job offers in Aachen, Braunschweig, Kiel and Stuttgart. He decided in favor of Stuttgart and was appointed to the full professorship for organic chemistry at the Technical University of Stuttgart on January 1, 1948 . He held this position until he reached retirement age in 1972. He declined honorable appointments at the universities of Frankfurt and Hamburg. In 1959 he became dean of the large faculty for natural sciences and humanities, and from 1959 to 1961 he was also rector of the Technical University of Stuttgart. He then chaired the Baden-Württemberg Rectors' Conference until 1963 and represented chemistry on the Science Council.

Hellmut Bredereck was President of the Society of German Chemists in 1968/69 and was a member of the Executive Board for six years, in 1967 and 1970 as Deputy President. He was also a member of the board of trustees of the German Cancer Research Center and the narrow board of trustees of the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie. In 1969 he became a member of the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , the oldest permanent natural research academy in the world.

After him, the Hellmut Bredereck Foundation was set up by his widow at the Society of German Chemists in 1995, which awards the Hellmut Bredereck Prize at regular intervals . The foundation supports young scientists who are successfully active in their former field of work, bio-organic chemistry . His areas of work included organic and bio-organic chemistry with a focus on carbohydrates as well as heterocycles , proteins and nucleotides .

He was considered an outstanding scientist, educator and distinguished reformer and was happy to take part in the Bergedorf Round Table , which promotes international dialogue between politics, science, business and society. The results of his work are documented in over 250 publications from various areas of organic chemistry and biochemistry. Hellmut Bredereck is considered one of the most important German chemists of the 20th century. His syntheses of purine from formamide, caffeine from uric acid, the introduction of formamide as a synthetic building block, as well as fundamental studies of nucleic acids (proof of the furanoside structure in nucleosides, synthesis of cytidyl and uridyl acids) contributed significantly to the expansion of modern organic chemistry.

As chairman of the Baden-Württemberg State Rectors' Conference, Hellmut Bredereck played a key role in founding the University of Konstanz and Ulm University . He was a member of the organizational committee for the expansion of the University of Mannheim and the founding committee for the Hannover Medical School. From 1964 to 1967 he was chairman of the scientific commission and deputy chairman of the science council as well as a member of the education commission of the German education council. In this function, he contributed to numerous important recommendations, such as the reorganization of courses at the scientific universities, the expansion of universities and scientific institutions outside the universities. The education of the next generation of scientists was particularly important to him, which is why he campaigned for a comprehensive university reform and vehemently advocated shortening chemistry studies. He turned down the office of Federal Minister for Education and Science under Federal Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger because he saw himself as a scientist and not a politician.

He is also one of the honorary founding members of the Association of Friends of the Institute Dr. Flad e. V. and was chairman of the examination committee at the Institute Dr. Flad.

The Bredereck-imidazole synthesis, the Bredereck-Gompper reaction and the Bredereck-Simchen reagent were named after him.

He had been married to the mathematician Elisabeth Niedergerke since 1933 and had three PhD chemists as sons. One of them is Karl Bredereck .

Awards

• 1966 Emil Fischer Medal for outstanding work in the field of organic chemistry
• 1969 Large Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Life data, publications and academic family tree of Hellmut Bredereck at academictree.org, accessed on January 14, 2018.
2. ↑ Wolfgang Girnus , Horst Remane : Milestones in Chemistry 2004 ( Memento from February 14, 2005 in the Internet Archive ). News from Chemistry , 52 (1), 11-18; doi : 10.1002 / nadc.20040520106 .
3. ↑ Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Department Main State Archive Stuttgart: Holdings Q 1/45: Estate Wolfgang Meckelein (1919–1988) - Foreword , accessed on August 24, 2009.

Web links

• Literature by and about Hellmut Bredereck in the catalog of the German National Library
• Hellmut Bredereck in the professorial catalog of the University of Leipzig