Plant Pigments

Posted by jns on 30 June 2008

This is chemist Richard Willstätter. I confess that his name was not familiar to me despite his having won the 1915 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Here are two short excerpts from his Nobel biography that summarize his prize-winning research.

As a young man he studied [c. 1902] principally the structure and synthesis of plant alkaloids such as atropine and cocaine. In this, as in his later work on quinone and quinone type compounds which are the basis of many dyestuffs, he sought to acquire skill in chemical methods in order to prepare himself for the extensive and more difficult work of investigating plant and animal pigments. [From Munich he went to work in Switzerland for seven years, returning to Germany in 1912, where he took up a position in a newly established Institute of Chemistry in Berlin/Dahlem.]

In the two short years before the outbreak of the first World War he was able with a team of collaborators to round off his investigations into chlorophyll and, in connexion with that, to complete some work on haemoglobin and, in rapid succession, to carry out his studies of anthocyanes, the colouring matter of flowers and fruits. These investigations into plant pigments, especially the work on chlorophyll, were honoured by the award of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1915)….

His main achievement, according to the Nobel presentation, was elucidating the chemical nature of the chlorophyll and “having been the first to recognize and to prove with complete evidence the fact that magnesium is not an impurity, but is an integral part of the native, pure chlorophyll – a fact of high importance from the biological point of view (source, the rest of which makes for very interesting reading).” By the way, “Plant Pigments” was the title of Willstätter’s Nobel lecture.

He continued to be productive after winning the prize and worked until he chose to end his career in what must have seemed a startling move.

Willstätter’s career came to a tragic end when, as a gesture against increasing antisemitism, he announced his retirement in 1924. Expressions of confidence by the Faculty, by his students and by the Minister failed to shake the fifty-three year old scientist in his decision to resign. He lived on in retirement in Munich, maintaining contact only with those of his pupils who remained in the Institute and with his successor, Heinrich Wieland, whom he had nominated. Dazzling offers both at home and abroad were alike rejected by him. In 1938 he fled from the Gestapo with the help of his pupil A. Stoll and managed to emigrate to Switzerland, losing all but a meagre part of his belongings.

He lived in Switzerland until he died on 3 August 1942, of a heart attack. I was interested to read that a memorial to Willstätter was unveiled in Muroalto, where he lived his last years, in 1956, the year I was born.

This portrait photograph (source) was taken in 1942 by an unidentified photographer. And now we come to the original reason that Willstätter is the subject of this post, namely so that I could mention that the Smithsonian Institution’s Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology has put some of their large collection of portraits of scientists and inventors online at Flickr: “Portraits of Scientists and Inventors“. This collection has 144 portraits; they tell us that the entire collection is available online in the “Scientific Identity” digital collection.

I first read about the Smithsonian Library’s adding photographs to the Flickr commons project by reading an entry in the Smithsonian Library’s blog. It wasn’t long ago that the Library of Congress delighted fans of photography by putting big chunks of their collections on Flickr in a first-of-its-kind collaboration.

It’s a lot of fun with wonderful images to see; it’s also a great sink of one’s time. But this is culture and heritage and history, right? Besides, I think we’re all better people for knowing more about Richard Willstätter now. What a learning experience is Beard of the Week!

I expect we’ll be exploring more of these portraits in the future.