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Vladmir Prelog (July 23, 1906 - January 7, 1998) won the
Nobel Prize in chemistry in
1975. He was born in Sarajevo, at that time
within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He died in
Zurich, Switzerland
Prague
In 1915, as a child, Prelog moved to Zagreb.
Educated in Zagreb and Osijek, he graduated
from the Czech Institute of Technology in Prague (Praha) in 1929, receiving a degree as a chemical engineer. His teacher was Emil Votoček, while his assistant Rudolf Lukeš
introduced him to the world of organic chemistry.
After gaining the Sc.D. in chemistry, he started to work in the private plant
laboratory of G.J. Dríza in Prague, in charge of the production of rare chemicals that were not available on the market at that
time. His pastime was spent in his own research, where he started investigating alkaloids from the cacao bark.
Zagreb
In 1935, he was invited to join the Technical Faculty (Tehnicki Fakultet) of
the University of
Zagreb, where he took the post of lecturer in organic
chemistry. He also taught students of chemical
engineering. With the help of collaborators and students, and financially sponsored by the pharmaceutical factory "Kašel" (currently Pliva), he started research of quinine and its compounds. Final works with the industry yielded a financially successful production of
Streptazol, one of the first
commercial sulfonylamides.
Scientific work here was crowned with the first synthesis of adamantane, a hydrocarbone with an unusual alicyclic structure, being isolated from Moravian oil.
The results of Prelog's work have been published in the top European chemical literature and journals, while the organic
chemistry developed in Zagreb at that time was well known and identifiable around the world.
Zurich
In 1941, he accepted the invitation of Lavoslav Ružička and left for Zurich, to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH - Eidgenössische Technische
Hochschule). He was promoted, starting as private senior lecturer and ending up becoming professor. After Ružička's retirement in 1957, Prelog took over
the organic chemistry laboratory where he expanded its activity to unusual areas: heterocyclic
compounds, alkaloids, alicyclic compounds, and the isolation and study of biochemically active compounds found in smaller
quantities in animal organisms. He also studied the structure of antibiotics
and the stereochemistry of enzyme reactions.
His research has contributed to the explanation of the structure of steroids,
triterpene, quinine, strichnine, solanine and other alkaloids introducing
so-called Prelog's regulation, which defines the conformational relations
between reactants and products. Working with Robert Cahn and Christopher Ingold, he formulated the so-called CIP system, applied generally in stereometry. Thanks to him and Ružička, both Nobel prize winners of Croatia, Zurich has become one of the most significant centers of modern organic chemistry.
Nobel Prize winner
Prelog received the 1975 Nobel Prize
for chemistry for his works in the field of natural compounds and stereochemistry, sharing it with the British research chemist J.W. Cornforth. His scientific opus encompasses more than 400 works. Lecturer of distinctive style and
eloquence, he trained many generations of chemists. In 1986, he became an honorary member
of the Croatian Academy of Science and Arts (Hrvatska Akademija Znanosti i
Umjetnosti).
The ordinary person
As a private person, he was the source of anecdotes about almost all eminent chemists all over the world. An intellectual with
a wide cultural background, he never insisted on authority and was unused to confrontation. He was one of the 109 Nobel Prize
winners who signed the peace appeal for Croatia in 1991. As an introspective person,
ironical and suspicious of high social, political or religious aspirations, Prelog rarely allowed people insight into his inner
life. An urn containing Prelog's ashes was ceremoniously interred at the Mirogoj cemetery in Zagreb on September 27th 2001.
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