Everything about Vladimir Prelog totally explained
Vladimir Prelog (
July 23 1906 –
January 7 1998) was a renowned
chemist and
Nobel Prize winner in
chemistry. Prelog lived and worked in
Prague,
Zagreb and
Zürich during his lifetime.
Biography
Prelog was born in
Sarajevo,
Bosnia and Herzegovina, at that time within the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, to
Croatian parents who were working there. In 1915, as a child, Prelog moved to
Zagreb (
Croatia) with his parents. Educated in
Zagreb and
Osijek, he graduated from the
Czech Institute of Technology in
Prague (
Praha) in 1929, receiving a degree as a chemical
engineer. His teacher was Emil Votoček, while his assistant Rudolf Lukeš introduced him to the world of
organic chemistry.
After gaining the
Sc.D. in chemistry, he started to work in the private plant laboratory of G.J. Dríza in Prague, in charge of the production of rare chemicals that were not available on the market at that time. His pastime was spent in his own research, where he started investigating
alkaloids from the
cacao bark.
Career
Zagreb
In 1935, he was invited to join the Technical Faculty (
Tehnički Fakultet) of the
University of Zagreb, where he took the post of lecturer in
organic chemistry. He also taught students of
chemical engineering.
With the help of collaborators and students, and financially sponsored by the pharmaceutical factory "Kaštel" (currently
Pliva), he started research of
quinine and its compounds. Final works with the industry yielded a financially successful production of
Streptazol, one of the first commercial
sulfonamides.
Scientific work here was crowned with the first synthesis of
adamantane, a
hydrocarbon with an unusual
alicyclic structure, being isolated from
Moravian oil fields.
The results of Prelog's work have been published in the top European chemical literature and journals, while the
organic chemistry developed in Zagreb at that time was well known and identifiable around the world.
Zürich
In 1941, he accepted the invitation of
Lavoslav Ružička and left for
Zürich,
Switzerland, to the
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (
ETH, or Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule). He was promoted, starting as private senior lecturer and ending up becoming
professor.
Prelog was able to separate the
chiral enantiomeres of
Tröger's base in 1944 by
chromatography on a
optical activ substrate . With this
racemic separation he was able to proof that not only carbon but also nitrogen atoms can be the chiral centre in a molecule, which was speculated for several years.
After Ružička's retirement in 1957, Prelog took over the organic chemistry laboratory where he expanded its activity to unusual areas:
heterocyclic compounds, alkaloids,
alicyclic compounds, and the isolation and study of biochemically active compounds found in smaller quantities in animal organisms. He also studied the structure of
antibiotics and the
stereochemistry of
enzyme reactions.
His research has contributed to the explanation of the structure of
steroids,
triterpene, quinine,
strychnine,
solanine and other alkaloids introducing so-called Prelog's regulation, which defines the
conformational relations between reactants and products. Working with
Robert Cahn and
Christopher Ingold, he formulated the so-called
CIP system, applied generally in
stereometry.
Thanks to him and Ružička, Zürich has become one of the most significant centers of modern
organic chemistry.
Nobel Prize
Prelog received the 1975
Nobel Prize for chemistry for his works in the field of natural compounds and stereochemistry, sharing it with the
Australian/
British research chemist
John Cornforth.
His scientific opus encompasses more than 400 works. Lecturer of distinctive style and eloquence, he trained many generations of chemists. In 1986, he became an honorary member of the
Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Private life
As a private person, he was the source of anecdotes about almost all eminent chemists all over the world. An intellectual with a wide cultural background, he never insisted on authority and was unused to confrontation. As an introspective person, ironic and suspicious of high social, political or religious aspirations, Prelog rarely allowed people insight into his inner life. He was one of the 109 Nobel Prize winners who signed the peace appeal for Croatia in 1991.
Vladimir Prelog died in
Zürich, at the age of 91. An urn containing Prelog's ashes was ceremoniously interred at the
Mirogoj cemetery in
Zagreb on
September 27 2001.
Further Information
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