László Zechmeister

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László Zechmeister (born May 14, 1889 in Győr / Austria-Hungary, † February 28, 1972 in Pasadena ) was a Hungarian-American chemist and university professor. He was a pioneer in column chromatography .

Life

Zechmeister studied chemistry and received his doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 1913 . His doctoral supervisor was the Nobel Prize winner Richard Willstätter . He then went to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin and the Danish Agricultural and Veterinary Academy in Copenhagen. Shortly after the First World War, he also worked with George de Hevesy in Budapest. In 1923 he became a professor at the University of Pécs and in 1940 emigrated to the USA and was professor of organic chemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, where he retired in 1959.

In 1938 he founded the series of advances in the chemistry of organic natural products .

Zechmeister played a key role in the development of column chromatography in the 1930s. He used it to investigate carotenoids and related dyes, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons as carcinogens, enzymes and provitamins. He succeeded in separating cis and trans isomers by column chromatography .

He also researched the partial hydrogenation of polynuclear aromatics .

Fonts

  • Cariotinoids: a biochemical report on vegetable and animal polyene dyes, Springer 1934
  • with Laszló von Cholnoky: The chromatographic adsorption method: basis, methodology, applications, Springer 1938
  • with Laszló von Cholnoky: Principles and Practice of Chromatography, 1943
  • Progress in Chromatography 1938–1947, London: Chapman and Hall 1950
  • Cis-trans isomeric Carotenoids, vitamins A and arypolyenes, Springer 1962

literature

  • Michaela Wirth: László Zechmeister: His Life and Pioneering Work in Chromatography . Springer, 2013, ISBN 331900641X
  • Winfried R. Pötsch (lead), Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989, p. 485

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Louis Fieser, Mary Fieser: Organic chemistry. 2nd Edition. Verlag Chemie, Weinheim 1972, ISBN 3-527-25075-1 , p. 1400.
personal data
SURNAME Zechmeister, László
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Zechmeister, Laszlo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian chemist
DATE OF BIRTH May 14, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Győr
DATE OF DEATH February 28, 1972
Place of death Pasadena