Ronald George Wreyford Norrish
Ronald George Wreyford Norrish (born November 9, 1897 in Cambridge , † June 7, 1978 there ) was an English chemist .
In 1967 George Wreyford Norrish was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Manfred Eigen and George Porter “for the investigation of extremely fast chemical reactions triggered by the destruction of the equilibrium by very short energy impulses” . He is one of the founders of photochemistry , with which he has been concerned since 1922 (e.g. the fluorescence of nitrogen dioxide in 1923 and the mechanism of its photolysis).
One of his scientific achievements is the development of the Norrish reaction - a photochemical reaction between ketones and aldehydes . After the Second World War he and Porter developed flash photolysis to investigate very rapid reactions (using techniques that were originally developed by the military for photographing rockets, for example). The reaction is triggered by a short flash of high intensity and the intermediate products are observed in a second short flash of light. This enabled reactions in the microsecond range to be observed with a time resolution and the formation of free radicals. He later investigated the timing of conformational changes in proteins and nucleic acids.
Norrish was the son of a pharmacist and businessman. During the First World War he was a soldier and a German prisoner of war. He then studied from 1919 natural sciences and especially chemistry at Cambridge University (Emmanuel College) with his doctorate in 1925. Eric Rideal was one of his teachers . After completing his doctorate, he was a research assistant at Cambridge. From 1937 to 1965 he was professor of physical chemistry at Cambridge. In 1960 he was elected a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences .
literature
- Winfried Pötsch u. a. Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989
Web links
- Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1967 award ceremony for Ronald George Wreyford Norrish
Individual evidence
- ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 180.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Norrish, Ronald George Wreyford |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | English chemist and Nobel Prize winner in chemistry |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 9, 1897 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Cambridge |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 7, 1978 |
| Place of death | Cambridge |