William S. Knowles

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George W. Bush meets seven 2001 Nobel Prize winners. William S. Knowles is fourth from left.

William Standish Knowles (born June 1, 1917 in Taunton , Massachusetts , † June 13, 2012 in Chesterfield , Missouri ) was an American chemist and Nobel Prize winner .

Life

Knowles grew up in New Bedford . He attended boarding school in Berkshire in western Massachusetts and in Andover , where he also had his first contact with chemistry.

He studied chemistry at Harvard University and then at Columbia University with Bob Elderfield on steroids . After Knowles in 1942 at Columbia University with Robert Cooley Elderfield with the work A preliminary investigation of the constituents of Astragalus wootoni. Β-substituiertem-Δα, Β-butenolides of the naphthalene, indene and norcholane series doctorate , he worked until 1986 for the Monsanto Company.

In 1944 he worked in St. Louis on intermediates and later on DDT and chloramphenicol . Monsanto engaged Robert B. Woodward during this time to promote the commercialization of cortisone . Knowles was assigned to Woodward because he had a background in steroid chemistry. Knowles spent nine months in Cambridge with Woodward. Knowles continued his career at Monsanto in research and development, where he worked in the field of asymmetric synthesis in the mid-1960s until he retired in 1986.

Knowles used asymmetric catalysis with chiral ligands for the first time industrially at Monsanto in the production of L-DOPA with the ligand DIPAMP . It was a chirally catalyzed hydrogenation reaction .

Honors

Knowles has received various honors and awards for his work. In 1974 he was awarded the IR 100 Awards for Asymmetric Hydrogenation and in 1978 the St. Louis American Chemical Society Section Award. In 1981 he received the Thomas and Hochwalt Award from Monsanto, and a year later the American Chemical Society's Creative Invention Award . The Organic Reactions Catalysis Society presented him with the Paul N. Rylander Award in 1996 . In 2004, Knowles was elected to the National Academy of Sciences .

In 2001 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on chiral catalyzing hydrogenation reactions, together with the Japanese Ryoji Noyori and his compatriot K. Barry Sharpless .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ William Knowles, Nobel Winner in Chemistry, Dies at 95
  2. ^ A century of Nobel Prizes recipients: chemistry, physics, and medicine, by Francis Leroy . books.google.de. Retrieved November 29, 2009.
  3. ^ Biographical data, publications and academic family tree of William Standish Knowles at academictree.org, accessed February 24, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Knowles, William S.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Knowles, William Standish
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American chemist and Nobel Prize winner in chemistry
DATE OF BIRTH June 1, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Taunton , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH June 13, 2012
Place of death Chesterfield , Missouri