Tadeus Reichstein

Origins and early life

Tadeus Reichstein was born on 20 July 1897 at Włocławek, then in the Russian partition of Poland, into a well-off Polish-Jewish family with strong patriotic traditions; his parents were Izydor Reichstein and Gastawa Brockmann, and they named him after Tadeusz Kościuszko. He spent his early childhood in Kiev, where his father worked as an engineer.

Work and career

The pogroms that swept the Russian Empire in 1905 decided the family on leaving: Tadeus was sent first to a boarding school in Jena and reached Zürich in 1907, at the age of ten. He studied under Hermann Staudinger at Karlsruhe, where he met Leopold Ružička, and it was in Ružička's laboratory at the ETH in Zürich that in 1933 he achieved, independently of Norman Haworth's group in Britain, the synthesis of vitamin C — the Reichstein process, still the basis of the industrial route today.

In 1937 he moved to the University of Basel, where he held the chair of pharmaceutical chemistry and then, from 1946 to his retirement in 1967, of organic chemistry.

Recognition

There he isolated and identified hormones of the adrenal cortex, work that led to cortisone and to the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Edward Kendall and Philip Hench. In his last three decades he turned to the chemistry and cytology of ferns and published some eighty papers on them. He died in Basel on 1 August 1996, aged 99.