Otto Isler

Otto Isler (born August 4, 1910 in Schaffhausen ; † September 28, 1992 in Uttwil ) was a Swiss chemist . He was a citizen of Wagenhausen and from 1951 of Basel .

Life

Family grave in the Hörnli cemetery , Riehen, Basel-Stadt

Otto Isler was the son of a secondary school teacher and studied chemistry at the ETH Zurich , where he received his doctorate in 1935 with Leopold Ruzicka with a dissertation on betulin . As a post-doctoral student he was at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York. There he dealt with triterpenes under Walter Abraham Jacobs . From 1936 he was a research chemist at Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel. He achieved syntheses of various fat-soluble vitamins and their implementation in industrial production: 1938 vitamin E with Paul Karrer , 1939 vitamin K 1, 1947 vitamin A , 1960 vitamin A2. In 1954 he succeeded in the first industrial synthesis of beta-carotene (provitamin A), followed by other carotenoids , and he also synthesized various aromatic substances. From 1954 to 1973 he was Head of Chemical Research at Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel, and from 1973 to 1975 he was a member of the Executive Committee.

In 1976 he gave the Paul Karrer lecture on fat-soluble vitamins and carotenoids. In 1971 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Amsterdam and 1980 in Basel . From 1974 to 1976 he was President of the Swiss Chemical Society.

From 1971 to 1979 he was a member of the Steering Committee of IUPAC .

Fonts

• Editor with Hugo Gutmann, Ulrich Solms: Carotinoids. Birkhäuser, 1971.
• with Georg Brubacher: Vitamins. 2 volumes. Thieme, 1982, 1988–

Web links

• Kurt Bernhard: Isler, Otto. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kläui, Isler: Why do you color food? (= Chemistry in our time. Volume 15, 1981, No. 1, p. 9; short biography).