Rolf Geiger (chemist)

Rolf Geiger (born July 22, 1923 in Bodman-Ludwigshafen , † September 1, 1988 ) was a German chemist. For almost twenty years he was head of the peptide group in pharmaceutical research at Hoechst AG in Frankfurt, which he founded in 1969, and was honorary professor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main .

In 1988 he was awarded the Emil Fischer Medal for work on industrial peptide syntheses - especially of insulin . He and Rainer Obermeier achieved the breakthrough in industrial, semi-synthetic insulin production in the mid-1970s when they converted pig insulin into human insulin by exchanging an amino acid . The product was launched in 1983 (see insulin preparations ). At the end of the 1970s, however, the development of genetically engineered insulins began at Genentech and Hoechst.

He studied at the University of Tübingen and received his doctorate in 1956 from the TU Berlin under Friedrich Weygand . In 1957 he went into peptide research at Hoechst in Frankfurt.

literature

• In memoriam . In: Günther Jung, Ernst Bayer (Ed.): Peptides 1988: Proceedings of the 20th European Peptide Symposium. University of Tübingen . Walter de Gruyter , Berlin, Munich, Boston 1989, ISBN 978-3-11-088470-8 , pp. XXI .
• Theodor Wieland, Miklos Bodanszyk: The World of Peptides . A Brief History of Peptide Chemistry. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg 1991, ISBN 978-3-642-75852-2 ( limited preview in Google book search).
• Ernst Bäumler: colors, formulas, researchers . Hoechst and the history of industrial chemistry in Germany. Piper, Munich 1989, ISBN 978-3-492-10971-0 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Conferences . In: News from chemistry, technology and the laboratory . tape 36 , no. November 11 , 1988, pp. 1252 , doi : 10.1002 / nadc.19880361131 .