Tadeusz Reichstein

Tadeusz Reichstein was a Polish-Swiss chemist whose research on adrenal cortex hormones culminated in the isolation of cortisone. He first made his name in 1933 by synthesizing vitamin C using a method that became known as the Reichstein process, one of the earliest industrial routes to the vitamin. He shared the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Edward Calvin Kendall and Philip Showalter Hench for their work on hormones of the adrenal cortex, work that led directly to cortisone becoming available as a treatment. Reichstein studied under Hermann Staudinger at the Technical University of Karlsruhe, achieved his vitamin C synthesis at ETH Zurich in 1933, and moved to the University of Basel in 1937, where he served as professor of pharmaceutical chemistry and later of organic chemistry until 1967. In his later career he turned to the phytochemistry and cytology of ferns, publishing more than eighty papers on the subject, and at his death in Basel at age ninety nine he was the longest lived Nobel laureate up to that time.