Raymond Lemieux

Raymond Urgel Lemieux was a Canadian organic chemist, born in Lac La Biche, Alberta, on June 16, 1920, who pioneered many discoveries in chemistry, the first and most famous being the synthesis of sucrose. His family moved to Edmonton in 1926, and he studied chemistry at the University of Alberta, receiving a BSc with Honours in 1943, and then took a PhD in organic chemistry at McGill University in 1946. He won a post-doctoral scholarship at Ohio State University and in 1954 accepted the position of Dean of the Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences at the University of Ottawa, where he established the Department of Chemistry. His contributions include the discovery of the anomeric effect and general methodologies for the synthesis of saccharides still used in carbohydrate chemistry. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Society, and received the Albert Einstein World Award of Science and the Wolf Prize in Chemistry. He died on July 22, 2000.