Albert Eschenmoser

Albert Jakob Eschenmoser was a Swiss organic chemist, born on 5 August 1925, best known for his work on the synthesis of complex heterocyclic natural compounds, most notably vitamin B12. He began his scientific career as a graduate student in the laboratory of Leopold Ruzicka at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, and in a long collaboration with Robert Burns Woodward at Harvard University a team of almost one hundred students and postdoctoral workers worked for many years on the total synthesis of vitamin B12. Besides his contributions to organic synthesis he pioneered work on the origins of life, studying the synthetic pathways of artificial nucleic acids. Before retiring in 2009 he held tenured teaching positions at ETH Zurich and at the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, with visiting professorships at the University of Chicago, Cambridge and Harvard. He died on 14 July 2023.