Martin Strell (chemist, 1912)

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Martin Strell (born February 5, 1912 in Munich , † February 18, 1999 ) was a German chemist .

Strell was the son of Martin Strell († 1967), Professor of Chemistry and Technology of Water and Wastewater at the Technical University of Munich and Government Chemist at the Bavarian Biological Research Institute. Strell also studied at the Technical University of Munich, received his doctorate there in 1939 ( on iso- and neopurpurins and partial syntheses in the chlorin series ), completed his habilitation and became a professor. From around 1950 he continued the work of his teacher Hans Fischer on the total synthesis of chlorophyll (with Alfred Treibs and others) and published about it in 1960 with Anton Kalojanoff and H. Koller, who came from Bulgaria. That happened a few months before Robert B. Woodwardand his international group. They took a slightly different route. Both synthesis routes went via pheophorbide ( Richard Willstätter in Munich had already shown the route from there to chlorophyll ). The synthesis by the group leader Martin Strell was already successful in 1955, but a review followed for several years. A lecture at the conference of the German Chemical Society in February 1960 was not held due to scheduling reasons, but Strell was promised a publication in the March issue of Angewandte Chemie , Woodward published there in May 1960. At that time, total synthesis was also in Basel worked.

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau , Volume 52. Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft , Stuttgart, 1999, p. 210.
  2. ↑ M. Strell, A. Kalojanoff, H. Koller, partial synthesis of the basic structure of chlorophyll a, of pheophorbide a , Angew. Chem., 72, 169-170 (1960).
  3. ↑ The Woodward biographers Benfey, Morris (ed.), Robert Burns Woodward, Chemical Heritage Foundation 2001, p. 251, quote Walter Lwowski, who described the work as completely immature ( utterly premature ). They describe Strell's follow-up work from 1962 as piecemeal and with inadequate characterization of some intermediate products. Eric Fontain, Die Münchner Chlorophyll-Synthesis , TU Munich, 2000, sees this in a different light, even though he admits that Woodward's synthetic route was simpler and more targeted.
  4. ^ Ortwin Fink, Artificial Bread for Mankind? A great feat of chemistry: Complete synthesis of chlorophyll succeeded in Munich , Die Zeit, No. 28, 1960
personal data
SURNAME Strell, Martin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German chemist
DATE OF BIRTH February 5, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH February 18, 1999