Johan Fredrik Eijkman

Dutch chemist , professor in pharmacy, toxicology and chemistry in Tokyo and Groningen.

He was the third of the ten children of school master Christiaan Eijkman (1822-1893) and Johanna Alida Pool (1814-1898). His younger brother Christiaan Eijkman won the 1929 noble prize for physiology and medicine. Sometimes the family name is spelled as Eykman.

Till age seventeen Eijkman studied at the private boarding school of his father. After that he followed some lessons on the HBS and worked in a glue factory for some time.

He got an apprenticeship with a pharmacist in Zaandam in 1869, became student Pharmacy at the University of Amsterdam in 1871 and graduated 1874 under pharmacist J.W. Gunning. Between 1872 and 1876 he was amanuensis (assistant) in Gunning's laboratory. He worked on a dissertation since 1875, but in 1876 he was appointed by the Japanese government to become a director of Laboratories in Nagasaki and Tokyo (1878) to study poisonous crops.

In 1880 he became a professor of Pharmacy an Chemistry in Tokyo. In 1885 he left because of health reasons and studied and rested between October 1885 en February 1886 in the famous hortus botanicus ”Kebun Raya Bogor” of Bogor (Dutch: Buitenzorg, etymology "Outside worry") in Java.

He went back to the Netherlands and lived first in Zaandam , later in Amsterdam, wrote scientific papers and worked at the lab of stereo-chemist Jacobus van 't Hoff. JH van 't Hoff wrote in ”La chimie dans l’espace” that the arrangement of the same atoms in space did matter. In pharmacy, stereo-isomers of the same molecule can be toxic or healing depending on the arrangement of atoms in space. It also depended on the dose (Paracelsus).

Between 1888 and 1891 he experimented with the work S.A. Arrhenius in his own Lab using refractometry. In 1897 he was appointed as professor in Pharmacy at the university of Groningen. His oration ”De roeping der pharmacie” (The call of pharmacy) was held on 9 December 1897.