Tadeus Reichstein

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Tadeus Reichstein bigraphy, stories - Chemists

Tadeus Reichstein : biography

20 July 1897 – 01 August 1996

Tadeusz Reichstein (20 July 1897 – 1 August 1996) was a Polish-born Swiss chemist and Nobel laureate.

Life and career

Reichstein was born into a Jewish family at Włocławek, Congress Poland. His parents were Gastava (Brockmann) and Isidor Reichstein.http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1950/reichstein-bio.html?print=1 He spent his early childhood at Kiev, where his father was an engineer. He began his education at boarding-school in Jena, Germany.

In 1933, working in Zürich, Switzerland, Reichstein succeeded, independently of Sir Norman Haworth and his collaborators in the United Kingdom, in synthesizing vitamin C (ascorbic acid) in what is now called the Reichstein process.

Together with E. C. Kendall and P. S. Hench, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1950 for their work on hormones of the adrenal cortex which culminated in the isolation of cortisone.

He died in Basel, Switzerland. The principal industrial process for the artificial synthesis of Vitamin C still bears his name. Reichstein was the longest-lived Nobel laureate at the time of his death, but was surpassed in 2008 by Rita Levi-Montalcini.