Leopold Ružička

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Leopold Ružićka

Leopold Ružička ( Lavoslav Stjepan Ružička ; born September 13, 1887 in Vukovar , Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia , Austria-Hungary ; † September 26, 1976 in Mammern , Canton Thurgau , Switzerland ) was a Croatian-Swiss chemist and university professor .

After studying at the Technical University of Karlsruhe and ETH Zurich , he was later appointed Professor of Chemistry at the latter and received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1939 .

Life

Ružička was the son of the cooper Stjepan Ružička and his wife Ljubica Sever; his ancestors included Danube Swabians , Slovaks and Austrians . Although his father died in 1891, Ružička managed to get the Matura (Abitur) in Osijek (in Slavonia ). 1906 enrolled , he at the Technical University of Karlsruhe for the field of chemistry, where he was interested primarily in organic chemistry. His doctoral supervisor Hermann Staudinger took him on as an assistant after successfully completing his doctorate in 1910.

In October 1912, Ružička Staudinger, who had received a call at the ETH Zurich , followed as an assistant to Zurich. In the same year he married Anna Hausmann. In 1918 he received the citizenship of Zurich. When he turned to his own research field for his habilitation in 1916 , it broke with Staudinger. Ružička had to look for a living and the necessary resources from the chemical industry. Ultimately, a model collaboration between academic and industrial research emerged. He worked with one of the oldest perfume factories in Europe; Haarmann & Reimer in Holzminden . In 1918 he was able to submit his habilitation at the ETH and just a few weeks later the CIBA company from Basel became interested in it. In 1920 he also became a private lecturer at the University of Zurich, which he remained until 1925. In 1921 the perfumers Chuit, Naef & Firmenich from Geneva offered him an extremely lucrative collaboration. In 1923 he was appointed adjunct professor at the ETH . Due to a lack of support at the ETH and better job opportunities in Geneva industry, Ružička moved to Geneva in 1926. In the same year he was appointed to the University of Utrecht , where he taught and researched as a professor of organic chemistry from October 1926 to 1929.

In 1929 he accepted the offer to return to ETH as Richard Kuhn's successor . Now he definitely settled in Zurich, where he bought a piece of land near the university and had a house built. At ETH, he initially devoted himself to expanding the laboratory that his predecessors had neglected. The fertile scientific environment and the chemical industry's increasing need for specialists ensured a lively influx of people at the institute. Tadeus Reichstein , who moved to the University of Basel in 1938 and received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1950, deserves special mention among his staff . In 1951 Ružička married Gertrud Acklin for the second time. In 1957 he retired from his professorship in chemistry at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule. He died in 1976 and was buried in the Fluntern cemetery.

plant

Ružička enjoyed a high scientific reputation for his work on multi-membered rings (he was considered the lord of the carbon rings , where he mainly dealt with non-aromatic ( alicyclic ) ring structures) and terpenes, as well as his studies on steroids and male sex hormones . In doing so, he expanded his knowledge of unusual ring structures in organic chemistry to include rings of up to 17 members, which was previously considered impossible, similar to rings with very few carbon atoms (fewer than six) at the time until the work of William Henry Perkin junior , the Ruzicka served as inspiration. Attempts to synthesize rings with 9 carbon atoms by Nikolai Dmitrijewitsch Selinski and Richard Willstätter had previously failed and eight carbon atoms were considered to be an upper limit.

He worked for the fragrance industry (where terpenes are widely used) and synthesized moscine (the main ingredient in musk ) and civet (main ingredient in the scent of civet cats ), which were previously very expensive natural products and threatened the animals from which they were derived. He determined the structure of the male sex hormones testosterone and androsterone and synthesized them. He was one of the most important pioneers in the field of terpenes next to Otto Wallach and Adolf von Baeyer and in 1922 formulated the Biogenetic Terpen Rule, which was already known from Wallach (the name comes from him).

Ružička found and synthesized effective insecticides (of the pyrethrin type ) from the chrysanthemum species Chrysanthemum cinerariifolium (formerly Pyrethrum cinerariaefolium , a Dalmatian insect plant ).

Honors

In 1939, together with Adolf Butenandt , he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on polymethylene and higher terpene compounds .

In addition to many other honors, Ružička was awarded a total of eight honorary doctorates .

He was a member of numerous scientific academies. In 1932 he was elected a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina .

In 1938 Ružička was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1944 to the National Academy of Sciences .

Every year, the ETH awards the Ružička Prize sponsored by the chemical industry to young chemists working in Switzerland.

Others

Ružička was also politically active (e.g. in the Swiss-Yugoslav Aid Association and against nuclear weapons ) and made a name for himself as an art collector: he donated a number of paintings by Dutch masters to the Kunsthaus Zürich and set up a Ružička Foundation that pursued the goal of these To be added to the collection in the Zurich Kunsthaus.

Fonts

  • For the knowledge of Wagner's rearrangement, Helvetica Chimica Acta, Volume 1, 1918, pp. 110-33
  • Ring formation in sesquiterpenes. Total synthesis of bisabolene and a hexahydrocadaline, Helvetica Chimica Acta, Volume 8, 1925, pp. 259-274
  • On the construction of organic matter , inaugural address on December 10, 1926 in the auditorium of the University of Utrecht , J. van Druten, Utrecht [around 1926], DNB 361659598 , ( Habilitation thesis University of Utrecht , 26 pages, 8).
  • with M. Stoll, HW Huyser, A. Boekenoogen: Production and physical data of various C-rings up to the 32-ring, Helvetica Chimica Acta, Volume 13, 1930, pp. 1152–1185
  • Constitution of Cholesterol and Bile Acids, Helvetica Chimica Acta, Volume 16, 1932, pp. 216-27;
  • Synthesis of a compound from the properties of testicular hormone, Helvetica Chimica Acta, Vol. 17, 1934, pp. 1389-94;
  • Synthesis of the testicle hormone (androsterone) and stereoisomers thereof, Helvetica Chimica Acta, Volume 17, 1934, pp. 1395-1406;
  • Derivatives of the synthetic androsterone and some of its stereoisomers, Helvetica Chimica Acta, Volume 18, | 1935, pp. 210-18;
  • The Isoprene Rule and the Biogenesis of Terpenic Compounds, Experientia, Volume 9, 1953, pp. 357-367
  • History of the Isoprene Rule, in: Proceedings of the Chemical Soc. 1959, pp. 341-360
  • In the Borderland between Bioorganic Chemistry and Biochemistry, Annual Review of Biochemistry, Volume 42, 1973, pp. 1-20

literature

Web links

Commons : Leopold Ružička  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Famous alumni: Leopold Ruzicka. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on February 10, 2018 ; accessed on February 10, 2018 . 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.unicp.de
  2. ↑ Ruzicka, Leopold . In: East German Biography (Kulturportal West-Ost)
  3. ↑ See his Nobel Lecture, Multimembered rings, higher terpene compounds and male sex hormones , pdf
  4. ↑ This means derivatives of tridecane (linear structures, built up from methylene groups ), which he used as starting materials for the synthesis of ring structures. Today, however, the term polymethylene refers to polymers ( polyethylene ) with a large number of methylene groups.
  5. ^ Member entry by Leopold Ruzicka (with picture) at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on June 23, 2016.
  6. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter R. (PDF; 508 kB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Retrieved February 6, 2018 .
  7. ↑ ETH Zurich: Ružička Prize . Retrieved March 18, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Ružička, Leopold
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ružička, Lavoslav Stjepan (former name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss chemist and Nobel Prize winner
DATE OF BIRTH September 13, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Vukovar
DATE OF DEATH September 26, 1976
Place of death Mammern , Canton of Thurgau