Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus

Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus (Berlin, December 25, 1876 - Göttingen, June 9, 1959) was a German chemist, physician, and university professor who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1928..

Biography

After studying at the Französisches Gymnasium in Berlin where he was mainly interested in literature, Windaus began his medical studies in 1895. Very impressed by a lecture by the 1902 Nobel laureate in chemistry Emil Fischer, He began to study chemistry in Freiburg without leaving his medical studies. He received his doctorate in 1900 with a thesis whose subject was a study of the poison extracted from digitalis.

Starting in 1906, he worked as a professor at the University of Innsbruck, and at the University of Göttingen from 1915 to 1944 as director of the Chemical Institute.

Scientific research

Once graduated, Windaus returns to Berlin to work with Emil Fischer, and meets Otto Diels (future Nobel Prize winner in chemistry in 1950) with whom he will maintain a long friendship. In 1901, he returns to Freiburg and begins to work on cholesterol and sterols. In 1919, he manages to transform cholesterol into cholanic acid (the latter had been isolated from bile acids by Heinrich Otto Wieland, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry in 1927. that he had a highly developed intelligence unlike his classmates, in his childhood he had a very bad time, because he wanted to be with his friends...)

Windaus made clear the link between sterols and bile acids. These investigations earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1928.

In 1931 he managed to obtain crystallized vitamin D by irradiating ergosterol, this being the first time a vitamin had been isolated in its purest form. He also worked on imidazole derivatives, which led him to show that histidine (an amino acid) is an imidazole derivative, and to discover histamine.

Literature

• j. Haas. Vigantol – Adolf Windaus und die Geschichte des Vitamin D. (2007) ISBN 3-8047-2223-7

• karl Dimroth. 1976. Das Portrait: Adolf Windaus 1876 - 1959. Chemie in unsererer Zeit 10 (6): 175-179 DOI 10.1002/ciuz.19760100603 ISSN 0009-2851