Hermann Emil Fischer
|Hermann Emil Fischer|
|Born||9 October 1852
Euskirchen, Rhine Province
|Died||15 July 1919, aged 66
|Known for||Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1902|
Emil Fischer – he never used his first name – was the founder of the chemistry of primary natural products: carbohydrates, purines and nucleosides, peptides and proteins. Amongst his many discoveries were the structure of carbohydrates, and he was the first to get synthetic peptides. He studied the active principles of tea, coffee and cocoa, namely, caffeine and theobromine.
Death[change | change source]
Fischer was married, but she died seven years after their marriage. They had three sons, one of whom was killed in World War I; another committed suicide at the age of 25 as a result of compulsory military training. At the end, suffering from terminal cancer, he is thought to have committed suicide in 1919. The eldest son, Hermann Otto Laurenz Fischer, was Professor of Biochemistry in the University of California, Berkeley from 1948 until his death in 1960.
References[change | change source]
- Fischer, Emil 1902. Syntheses in the purine and sugar group. 
- Sachi, Sri Kantha (2000). "Suicide: a Socratic revenge". Ceylon Medical Journal (45): 25–28. Archived from the original on 2012-03-01. http://web.archive.org/web/www.cmj.slma.lk/cmj4501/25.htm.
- "Emil Fischer". The Notable Names Database. 2008. http://www.nndb.com/people/703/000091430/. Retrieved 2008-09-18.
- Eduard, Farber (1970–80). Fischer, Emil Hermann. Dictionary of Scientific Biography 5. New York: Scribner's, pp. 1–5. ISBN 978-0-684-10114-9
- Baker, A. Albert 1970–80. Fischer, Hermann Otto Laurenz. Dictionary of Scientific Biography 5. New York: Scribner's, pp. 5–7. ISBN 978-0-684-10114-9