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  • Richard Martin Willstätter
  • Richard Martin Willstätter (13 August 1872–3 August 1942) was a German organic chemist whose study of the structure of plant pigments, chlorophyll included, won him the 1915 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Willstätter invented paper chromatography independently of Mikhail Tsvet.

    He was in the Department of Chemistry, first as a student of Adolf von Baeyer -- he received his doctorate in 1894 - then as a faculty member.
    In 1896 he was named Lecturer and in 1902 Professor extraordinarius.
    In 1905 he left Munich to become professor at the ETH Zürich and there he worked on the plant pigment chlorophyll. He determined its structure.
    In 1912 he became professor of chemistry at the University of Berlin and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, studying the structure of pigments of flowers and fruits.
    In 1916 he returned to Munich as the successor to his mentor Baeyer. During the 1920s Willstätter investigated the mechanisms of enzyme reactions and did much to establish that enzymes are chemical substances, not biological organisms.
    In 1938 Willstätter emigrated to Switzerland. He spent the last three years of his life there in Muralto near Locarno writing his autobiography. He died of a heart attack in 1942.
    Willstätter's autobiography, Aus meinem Leben, was not published in German until 1949. It was translated into English as From My Life in 1965.

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    tags:Richard Martin Willst?tter|The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1915
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