Richard Willstätter

WILLSTÄTTER, Richard (born 1872), an outstanding organic chemist, professor at the Higher Technical School in Zurich (from 1905), the University of Berlin (from 1912), and the University of Munich (1916–1925); he retired in 1925; Nobel Prize laureate (1915). Willstätter's research in the study of the composition, structure, and properties of many complex substances of plant and animal origin is considered classic. Especially important are his works on the investigation of the green substance of plants—chlorophyll, the blood pigment—hemin, a numerous group of flower coloring substances—anthocyanins, as well as alkaloids and enzymes. Willstätter discovered interesting structural relationships between chlorophyll and hemin. He found that both the blood pigment and the green substance of plants, when subjected to certain chemical transformations, yield the same substance—etioporphyrin, the structure of which Willstätter established with very high certainty. No less significant are Willstätter's works on the synthesis of many organic substances. Willstätter arrived at a new interpretation of the structure of benzene and naphthalene. The synthesis of a series of quinones, compounds of the quinhydrone type, provided abundant material for understanding the nature of dyes. To this same group of works should be attributed Willstätter's research in the field of alkaloids, among which the synthesis of cocaine that he carried out is of particularly great importance. Extremely valuable were the methods used by Willstätter in his research, especially the method of catalytic hydrogenation in solution and a number of methods for isolating unstable, easily changeable products, to which, for example, the majority of substances of plant and animal origin belong. In recent years, Willstätter, together with numerous collaborators, undertook a wide range of studies devoted to elucidating the nature of enzymes. Having developed completely new methods for isolating and purifying enzymes, based on adsorption and subsequent extraction of the enzyme, Willstätter achieved an extremely significant increase in the degree of purity of enzyme preparations. Applying the principles of chemical kinetics analysis, Willstätter found new ways of detecting the specificity of enzymes; he further clarified the significance of so-called "accompanying substances" for the activity and other properties of enzymes and established the colloidal-chemical structure of the enzyme molecule.—Monographs—Willstätter R. u. Stoll A., Untersuchungen über Chlorophyll, Berlin, 1913; by the same authors, Untersuchungen über die Assimilation d. Kohlensäure, Berlin, 1918; numerous articles by Willstätter since 1904 can be found in Berichte der deutschen chemischen Gesellschaft, Liebigs Annalen der Chemie, Zeitschrift für physiologische Chemie, and many others; for a list of works up to 1925, see J. C. Poggendorff, Biographisch-literarisches Handwörterbuch, B. V, Abt. 2, Leipzig-Berlin, 1926.