Vladimir Prelog Biography

World of Chemistry on Vladimir Prelog

Vladimir Prelog, the son of Milan Prelog, a Croatian high school teacher, and his wife Mara (née Cettolo), was born on July 23, 1906 in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzogovina, a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He served as a "flower boy" at the ill-fated visit of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, and his wife, whose assassination on July 28, 1914 initiated World War I.

Prelog's parents separated in 1915, and Prelog went to live with his paternal aunt and grandmother in Zagreb, where he spent his first three years in high school (Realgymnasium). At the age of 12 he began to experiment in his home chemistry laboratory. In 1918, Prelog joined his father in Osijek, where he attended a science-based high school. Encouraged in his love of chemistry by his chemistry teacher, he wrote his first article at age 15.

In 1921, Prelog moved to Zagreb, where he graduated from high school in 1924. He then entered the Chemical Engineering School of the Czech Institute of Technology in Prague, where he spent his spare time assisting his mentor and lifelong friend, Docent Rudolf Luke, with his research in alkaloid chemistry and receiving his Ing.-Chem. degree in 1928. His father was forced to retire early for political reasons and could no longer support him financially, forcing Prelog to complete his graduate studies as quickly as possible. Professor Emil Votoaek assigned him a natural products project, the constitution of the aglycone of a new glycoside, earning him his doctorate in 1929.

Because unemployment was severe in both Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, Prelog was unable to find an institutional research position. The Docent's former classmate hired him to design and direct a laboratory to prepare commercially unavailable chemicals. Prelog married Kamila Vítek on October 31, 1933. The couple had one son, Jan, born in 1949. In 1932 Prelog served in the Royal Yugoslav Navy, attaining the rank of sublieutenant. He contracted tropical malaria, providing the impetus for continuing his previous research on antimalarial drugs for another two decades.

Prelog returned to Zagreb in 1935 as a poorly paid lecturer (Docent, 1935-40) and subsequently Associate Professor (1940-41) at the inadequately equipped university. He was simultaneously appointed a consulting chemist for Ka%tel, Ltd., where the royalties from his commercial production of sulfanilamide enabled him to spend several months in 1937 working with fellow Croat Leopold Ruzicka at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (Federal Institute of Technology, ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland.

Aided by Nobel laureate Ruzicka, in 1941 Prelog migrated from German-occupied Zagreb to neutral Switzerland, where he remained for the rest of his life at the ETH. He served in various capacities: as a Privat-Dozent (1942-47); Associate Professor, (1947-50); and Professor (1950-76). In 1957, Prelog succeeded Ruzicka as Laboratory Director. Because he disliked administration and the use of power (He was totally devoid of autocratic tendencies), in 1965 he persuaded the ETH President to establish a collegial leadership for the laboratory in which all the professors participated, an unusual arrangement at that time. The freedom from administrative duties allowed Prelog to pursue his research more fully and to devote himself to other activities, such as consulting, traveling, lecturing, and board membership work. He served as Director of the Swiss pharmaceutical giant CIBA, Ltd. of Basel (later Ciba-Geigy, now Novartis) from 1963 to 1978, which had financially supported his work since 1943. He became a Swiss citizen in 1959 but considered himself a citizen of the world. In 1976, at the age of 70, he retired from the ETH but remained active in research.

The author of some 400 papers with about a hundred doctoral candidates and about a hundred co-workers, Prelog worked on a wide variety of research problems, mostly stereochemical projects. He abandoned his work on alkaloids, steroids, and terpenes of plant and animal origin and until 1970 devoted himself to compounds with novel types of structures and intriguing biochemical properties of interest to his industrial sponsors, which he isolated from microbial cultures. The first result of this research was a lactone carboxylic acid (Prelog-Djerassi lactone) that plays an important role in the synthesis of macrolides. Prelog's name is also associated with the Cahn-Ingold-Prelog (CIP) nomenclature system now universally used for the unambiguous specification of stereoisomers.

Prelog's research involved the determination of the structures for many natural products, including antiobiotics, nonactin, boromycin (the first discovered boron-containing natural product), ferrioxamins, and rifamycins; heterocyclic compounds; dyes; medicinal products; organ extracts; stereochemistry of medium-sized ring compounds from dicarboxylic acid esters by acyloin condensation; transannular reactions; asymmetric syntheses; stereoselectivity of microbial and enzymatic reactions; alicyclic chemistry; chirality in large and complicated molecules; and chemical topology. Together with Nobel chemistry laureate Sir Derek Harold Richard Barton, Prelog is recognized as a founder of conformational analysis.

Prelog was elected to membership in many scientific societies: foreign member, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Accademia dei Lincei (Rome), USSR Academy of Sciences; honorary member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Leopoldina (Halle/Saale), Royal Irish Academy, Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, and Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences; and fellow , Royal Society of Great Britain (1962). He held honorary doctorates from Zagreb (1954), Liverpool (1963), Paris (1963), Cambridge (1969), Brussels (1969), and Manchester (1971) universities.

Prelog's honors include the Werner Gold Medal, Schweizerische Chemische Gesellschaft (1945); Stas Medal (1962); Medal of Honor, Rice University (1962); Marcel Benoist Award (1965); Hofmann Medal (1968); Humphry Davy Medal (1968); Roger Adams Award in Organic Chemistry, American Chemical Society (1969); and Paracelsus Medal (1976). In 1975, along with Sir John Warcup Cornforth, he was awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry "for his work on the stereochemistry of organic molecules and reactions." A warm, compassionate man, modest in behavior and reticent in personal matters, as well as a captivating raconteur with a seemingly infinite repertoire of humorous jokes and anecdotes, Prelog died in Zürich on January 7, 1998 at the age of 91 after a brief illness.