Vladimir Prelog was born in 1906, to Milan and Mara (Cettolo) Prelog in Sarajevo, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Prelog's early life in general was surrounded by the political upheaval and war endemic to that part of the world. In 1924, he moved to Prague to study chemistry at the Czech Institute of Technology and earned his doctorate there in 1929.
In the severely depressed economy of the time, and particularly since he was not a citizen of Czechoslovakia, it was impossible to obtain a job with any research organization. Thus, from 1929 to 1934, Prelog worked unofficially with an entrepreneur who set up a home laboratory to supply specialty chemicals to business, government, and the military. He accepted a low paying teaching position at the University of Zagreb in 1935, and to make ends meet took a second job with a local pharmaceutical company. The company and university connections proved fruitful, and Prelog finally made sufficient money to support himself for a few months in 1937 working with the chemist Leopold Ruzicka at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, or ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. Prelog became a Swiss citizen in 1959 and spent the rest of his career at the ETH, financially supported for much of that time by the giant Swiss pharmaceutical company CIBA.
Beginning in the 1950s, the electronic instrumentation applicable to chemical structure determination improved markedly. A process that once required slow, highly skilled, creative observation and analysis became routine, as various types of spectrometers and other analytical instruments gave almost instantaneous information on the layout of atoms in large molecules. In this environment, the identification and synthesis of new organic compounds grew exponentially.
It became apparent to Prelog, beginning with his work on alkaloids, that the naming of these new millions of organic compounds could be greatly improved. Natural products are not only extremely complex, they are also extremely specific in their three dimensional shapes. Small differences in the way atoms are oriented in space may change the biochemistry of a compound completely. Thus, new synthetic techniques are required to obtain exactly the desired configuration of a molecule. The entire branch of organic chemistry devoted to the shapes and configurations of molecules is called stereochemistry, and the individual configurations of a molecule are called its stereoisomers. Prelog spoke about the requirements in an oral history for the Chemical Heritage Foundation: "If, for example, you have sixty-four stereoisomers [of the same molecule] and only one is a natural compound that is biologically active, you have to be able first to assign to this molecule a model or a stereo formula. Secondly, you have to have a certain language, symbols, descriptors, to speak about it. Finally, you need to be able to [synthesize] this specific stereoisomer [uncontaminated with the others].... We needed symbols to talk about our results."
Together with Robert Cahn and Sir Christopher Ingold, Prelog developed the CIP system of stereochemical nomenclature, which includes single letter symbols to designate specific characteristics of large molecules. The CIP system is now widely used as a standard in reference books and journals. Later, he developed new methods of synthesizing specific stereoisomers. For his body of work, specifically that related to stereochemical nomenclature and stereosynthesis, Prelog won the 1975 Nobel Prize (shared with Sir John Cornforth). He thus became the fifth director of ETH to win a Nobel. Additionally, he was the recipient of numerous honorary degrees throughout his life, as well as the Werner medal in 1945, and the Marcel Benoist award in 1965.
Prelog married Kamila Vitek in 1933, and their only child, was born in 1949. After his official retirement in 1976, he maintained his attachment to ETH by signing on as a postdoctoral student and working on the separation of complex chemical mixtures by the technique of chromatography. Becoming a student again (at least in name) inspired the title of his autobiography, My 132 Semesters of Chemistry Studies,.
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