Emil Fischer

German chemist, perhaps the most outstanding chemist of all times. In 1902 he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his synthetic work in sugar and purine groups of substances. He was an author of text works. His administrative work, especially when he went to Berlin, revealed him as a tenacious campaigner for the establishment of scientific foundations, not only in chemistry, but in other fields of work as well. His keen understanding of scientific problems, his intuition and love of truth and his insistence on experimental proof of hypotheses, marked him as one of the truly great scientists of all time.

The son of a successful business man, Emil was given three years with a private tutor. After attending the local school, he spent two years at school at Wetzlar, and two more at Bonn where he passed his final examination in 1869 with great distinction. His father wished him to enter the family lumber business, but Emil wished to study the natural sciences, especially physics. After an unsuccessful trial of Emil in the family business, his father - who, according to the laureate's autobiography, said that Emil was too stupid to be a business man and had better be a student - sent him in 1871 to the University of Bonn to study chemistry.

In 1872, however, Emil, who still wished to study physics, was persuaded by his cousin to go with him to the newly established University of Strasbourg, where Professor Rose was working on the Bunsen method of analysis. Here Fischer met Adolf von Baeyer, under whose influence he finally decided to devote his life to chemistry. In 1874 he took his PhD at Strasbourg with a thesis on fluorescence and orcin-phthalein. In the same year he was appointed assistant instructor at Strasbourg University and here he began the first of his many remarkable discoveries. The discovery of phenyl hydrazine, reputed to have been accidental, was related to much of Fischer's later work.