Kurt Alder

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Kurt Alder (1950)

Kurt Alder (born July 10, 1902 in Königshütte , Upper Silesia , † June 20, 1958 in Cologne ) was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1950 .

Memorial plaque on Alder's birthplace in Königshütte
Kurt Alder's grave slab

life and work

Kurt Alder grew up in his hometown Königshütte until 1922 East Upper Silesia was added to Poland and he fled with his parents via Berlin to Kiel, where he studied chemistry and in 1926 received his doctorate under Otto Diels at the University of Kiel “On the causes of the azoester reaction” .

During his habilitation in 1927, he discovered the special responsiveness of dienes and dienophiles . The reaction principle was presented by chair holder Diels in 1929 as the "diene syntheses", an ideal construction principle of organic substances. After his habilitation in 1930 he was appointed associate professor in Kiel in 1934. Because emerging overlaps with the fields of Diels Alder left the university and took a leadership role in 1936 in the IG Farben -Werk Leverkusen , where he primarily on the development of the synthetic rubber Buna was involved.

In 1937 he also worked as a lecturer at the University of Cologne and here in 1940 he received the chair for chemistry from the retired August Darapsky (1874–1942). He turned down a call to the University of Berlin (1944) as well as the call to the University of Marburg (1950). During the Second World War, his chemical institute was moved from Cologne to Marburg in 1944.

His area of ​​research concentrated throughout his life on the exhaustive and systematic investigation of the reactivities and stereoselectivities of this pericyclic reaction . Initially unexpected deviations led, for example, to the discovery of the ene reaction or the retro-Diels-Alder reaction . In the spring of 1958, Alder had to withdraw unexpectedly quickly from the university because of health problems. He died shortly after of a heart attack.

His deputy Franz Fehér (since 1949) took over the management of the chemical institute, which in 1961 was divided into an inorganic institute under his direction and an organic institute with Emanuel Vogel as professor.

His partner in the 1950s after receiving the Nobel Prize, Gertrud Bitzer (1905–1991), whom he had married on March 21, 1958, with a long history of heart disease, donated the remaining part of the prize money in her will in memory of Kurt Alder Kurt Alder Prize, which the Kurt Alder Foundation of the University of Cologne has awarded every year since 1994 to young scientists from Cologne in organic chemistry.

Honors

  • Awarded the Emil Fischer Memorial Medal from the Association of German Chemists (VDC) in 1938.
  • In 1939 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina Scholars' Academy .
  • In 1950, Alder and his teacher Otto Diels received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for their discoveries and the development of the diene synthesis” in 1927 ( Diels-Alder reaction ).
  • In 1950 he received an honorary doctorate from the Medical Faculty of the University of Cologne
  • 1952 honorary member of the Real Sociedad Espagnola de Fisica y Quimica in Madrid
  • Appointed Honorary Councilor of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas in Madrid in 1953.
  • In 1954 he received an honorary doctorate from the university in Salamanca, Spain.
  • In 1955 he was elected a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .
  • An insecticide made by the Diels-Alder addition in the 1970s was named Aldrin .

“Aldrin” synthesis by cycloaddition

  • In 1979 a large crater on the moon was named Alder in his honor .
  • The largest lecture hall in the chemical institute of the University of Cologne is named after Kurt Alder. Every year there is a "Kurt Alder Lecture" by a renowned lecturer.
  • In Cologne, on the right bank of the Rhine, where Alder had lived, a street was named after him.
  • Chemical Breakthrough Award 2011 from the American Chemical Society , [1]

Web links

Commons : Kurt Alder  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. biographical data, publications and Academic pedigree of Kurt Alder at academictree.org, accessed on January 1, 2018th
  2. O. Diels and K. Alder, On the causes of the “azoester reaction” in Justus Liebig's Annalen der Chemie 450, 237–254 (1926)
  3. O. Diels and K. Alder, Syntheses in the hydroaromatic series, I. Mitt. In Justus Liebigs Annalen der Chemie 460, 98-122 (1928) . The work was financially supported by the “Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft” fund and by chemical donations from IG Farben (Leverkusen), Haarmann & Reimer (Holzminden) and Schimmel & Co. (Leipzig).
  4. O. Diels, Die "Dien-Synthesen", an ideal structural principle of organic substances in Angewandte Chemie 42, 911–918 (1929)
  5. M. and W. Günzl, On the development of diene synthesis - Kurt Alder for memory in Angewandte Chemie 72, 219-286 (1960).
  6. History of the Chem. Institute of the University of Marburg , p. 10, on the instructions of the Reich Ministry for Science, Education and National Education , the winter semester 1944/45 had been outsourced to Marburg. On March 12, 1945, the Marburg Institute itself was destroyed by a British bomb attack.
  7. From the necrology of his colleagues M. and W. Günzl, Alder's personal letter is given: On April 21, 1958, Kurt Alder wrote to the Standing Committee for the Meeting of Nobel Prize Winners in Lindau: “That my answer to the friendly lines from Count Bernadotte dated December 1957 did not take place in time, I apologize. Unfortunately, there is a sad cause for my hesitation. - The constant and constantly growing overburdening of the active German university professor with ever new tasks (hopeless overcrowding of the institutes, ongoing overburdening with exams and increasingly complicated administrative work, participation in student subsidies such as fee waiver and Honnef model etc.) has in my case after years The depletion of my strength led to symptoms of exhaustion, which brought me the urgent medical advice to impose absolute restraint on me for the time being. "
  8. ^ History of chemistry at the University of Cologne
  9. ^ Curriculum Vitae Kurt Alder at Leopoldina
  10. ^ Kurt Alder Foundation and dependent foundations of the University of Cologne
  11. H. Budzikiewicz and A. Odenthal, Curriculum Vitae Kurt Alder at idw-online.de
  12. Member entry of Kurt Alder (with picture and CV) at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on February 3, 2016.
  13. ^ S. Goldschmidt, obituary of the BADW on Kurt Alder
  14. Aldrin formation is an example of an "inverse Diels-Alder addition" (electron-poor diene reacts with electron-rich dienophile)
  15. ^ Kurt Alder lectures since 1990